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Book lS_5 

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ERAS OF NONCONFORMITY 



BAPTIST AND CONGREGATIONAL 
PIONEERS 



First Edition, 1906. 
Stcoiud Edition, 1907. 




The Mayflower^ which bore the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth , 
England, to Plymouth. Massachusetts, in 1620. 



BAPTIST AND 
CONGREGATIONAL 
PIONEERS 



BY 

J. H. SHAKESPEARE, M.A. 



LONDON: NATIONAL COUNCIL OF EVANGELICAL FREE 
CHURCHES. THOMAS LAW, MEMORIAL HALL, E.C. 



THE KINGSGATE PRESS, KINGSWAY, W.C. 




Author 
MAY 23 19i3 



TO 

THE REV. WILLIAM GOODMAN, B. 

WHO, THROUGHOUT A LONG LIFE, HAS 
EXEMPLIFIED THE BEST TRADITIONS 
OF FREE CHURCHISM. 



PREFACE 



HE period which is dealt with in this 



X book is rich in lessons of heroic 
courage, endurance, and fidelity to con- 
science, but its main importance lies in the 
historic explanation which it supplies as to 
the origin and nature of the existing cleavage 
in English religious and ecclesiastical life. 
Separatism arose, in the first instance, upon 
a doctrine of the visible particular Church as 
distinct from the parish assembly of the 
Church of England, and also as a protest 
against the Royal Supremacy in matters 
ecclesiastical. 

No one would dream of writing the story 
without availing himself of the invaluable 
researches of Drs. H. M. Dexter, John 
Brown, and F. J. Powicke. I have, however, 
also gone to the original records, in some in- 




X 



PREFACE 



stances to records which have only recently 
become accessible. I have frequently re- 
jected accepted tradition as to events and 
dates, and in one case, have practically 
re-written the story. It is impossible, in the 
limits of this work, to give references, but I 
trust that no one will put aside my con- 
clusions without going to the originals as I 
have done. 

I desire to thank the Rev. T. G. Crippen, 
B.A., the librarian of the Congregational 
Library, who has placed its resources at my 
disposal, and also the Rev. W. T. Whitley, 
M.A., LL.D., for many valuable suggestions. 

J. H. SHAKESPEARE. 

HlGHGATE, 

December 22, 1905. 



CONTENTS 



i. 

PAGE 

The England of the Separatists . . i 



II. 

Robert Browne • . . . 21 
(i) The Making of a Congregationalism 



(ii) Apostleship and Apostasy. 



III. 



Barrow and Greenwood . . . • 54 

(i) Prisoners of Jesus Christ. 

(ii) Martyrdom. 

IV. 

John Penry and the Martin Marprelate 
Controversy . . . . .87 



xii 



CONTENTS 



V. 

PAGE 

Francis Johnson and Ainsworth. The Ancient 
Church in Exile • . . .105 



VI. 

John Smyth, the Se-Baptist , * .125 



VII. 

John Robinson. The Pilgrim Church . .150 



VIII. 

Henry Jacob. The Mother Church . .172 



Index . . , * . . .193 



I 



THE ENGLAND OF THE 
SEPARATISTS 

HE England of the sixteenth century 



JL cannot be explained apart from the 
translation of the Scriptures into the tongue 
of the common people. Through long gene- 
rations the Word of God had been hidden 
away in dusty libraries, and in the tongue of 
the learned. Its simple message had been 
obscured by notes and explanations of 
churchmen and schoolmen. The immense 
majority of the clergy themselves knew but 
little of the Bible. The great discovery, 
therefore, of the age was not the New World, 
but a book in which even the common man 
might see, as in a mirror, the primitive 
doctrine, sacraments, and ministry, and com- 
pare the astonishing and dazzling vision with 
what these had come to be. Wyclif, "the 
morning star" of the English Reformation, in 




2 



2 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



1380, gave a version in a tongue which, for 
freedom, vigour, and richness, we can only 
liken to that of his great contemporary, 
Chaucer. Revised by his disciple, Purvey, in 
1388, it was circulated in fragmentary manu- 
scripts and became the fountain-head of 
Lollardry. It was passed from hand to 
hand, read by the " vulgar and by women," 
until it was complained that they knew more 
of the Bible than did the priests themselves. 
Forbidden and suppressed, it is deeply inte- 
resting to note that most of the few remaining 
copies have been traced to the very districts 
where the first Separatist Churches arose. As 
with a magic wand, it called Lollardry into 
being, and though the new faith was stamped 
out in fire and blood, and though the deso- 
lating Wars of the Roses turned men's 
thoughts in other directions for a hundred 
years, yet it was so fruitful and so lit with the 
sunrise of an age to come that it has been 
truly said, "Out of the floating mass of 
opinion which bore the name of Lollardry, 
one great faith gradually evolved itself, a 
faith in the sole authority of the Bible as a 
source of religious truth." 

It was in the sixteenth century, however, 
that the English became a people of one 
Book. Erasmus, the friend of kings and 



SEPARATISTS 



3 



scholars, issued his Greek version of the New 
Testament in 1516. The printing-press 
scattered it far and wide. Its influence was 
extraordinary. For the first time since the 
early centuries, men saw Christ, " speaking, 
healing, dying, rising again, as it were," in 
their very presence. In France, in the 
German States, in Holland, and in our 
English realm, men searched the Scriptures 
in vain for the subtleties and superstitions of 
Rome, but as they followed the footprints of 
Christ through Galilee and Judea, they found 
how simple was His Gospel and how com- 
plete His sacrifice. They failed to recognise 
in ignorant priests and tyrannical prelates 
successors of the apostles whose words were 
recorded in the Acts and the Epistles. " In 
what point," demanded Bonner of the 
yeoman, Robert Smith, who was burnt at 
Uxbridge in Mary's reign, " do us differ from 
the word of God ? " The reply was swift 
and definite, " In hallowing water ; in con- 
juring of the scenes ; in baptizing children 
with anointing and spitting in their mouths, 
mingled with salt ; and many other lewd 
ceremonies, of which not one point is able 
to be proved by God's order." " By my 
troth," said Sir John Mordant, " I never 
heard the like in all my life. He disalloweth 



4 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



therein holy ointment, salt, and other laudable 
ceremonies, which no Christian man will 
deny." The translation of the Bible carried 
with it immeasurable changes and the birth 
of the modern world. Tindale issued his 
version of the New Testament in 1525. 
Miles Coverdale gave the English Bible in 
1535. The Great English Bible was 
authorised in 1539. The Bible was placed 
in every church. It was read aloud in 
countless homes. It did its own work. 
Separatism was a part of the inevitable 
outcome. If it were possible to-day to ex- 
tinguish Separatism with its doctrines and 
adherents, and the open Bible were yet 
retained, there would be Baptists and Con- 
gregationalists to-morrow. 

In this period we enter into a world swayed 
by theological opinions, passions, and con- 
flicts. The issue in a later generation came 
to be that of political freedom, but now it 
was more vital and divine than a question of 
taxation or the authority of Parliament. The 
nation became the arena of warring creeds 
and Churches. It was stirred to its depths 
by a theological pamphlet. The seething 
ferment and the endless strife of parties in 
Church and State, in the palace, at St. Paul's 
Cross, among clerics and statesmen, soldiers, 



SEPARATISTS 



traders, and peasants, raged round the royal 
supremacy, the mass and ecclesiastical vest- 
ments. A fresh set of names began to appear 
in our English history, Papist, Conformist, 
Non-Conformist, Puritan, Presbyterian, Ana- 
baptist, and Brownist, all with a religious 
significance, and the story of the time is 
bound up with them. It is not to be sup- 
posed that men were more intent then upon 
the unseen and the eternal ; but life itself, 
security, conduct, property, wars, and foreign 
alliances turned on the mysteries of religion 
and the articles of a creed. 

The problem of government for Henry 
VIII. and his immediate successors was, 
how to preserve peace in an England con- 
taining a Catholic majority, under rulers who 
rejected the Papal authority. It arose in the 
first instance through one of the accidents of 
history, and was bound up with the bluff and 
strong-willed King's matrimonial affairs. It 
is not for us to discuss whether the same 
issue would have arisen if there had been no 
Catherine of Arragon. It is enough to record 
that the Defender of the Faith against Luther, 
the man who hated Protestantism and held 
every article of the Catholic Creed, who made 
burning the penalty for the denial of the doc- 
trine of transubstantiation, liberated England 



6 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



from the power of Rome, and began the 
movement which, with swift strides, passed 
into the Reformation. Henry dissolved the 
monastic orders, set the Bible free to do its 
own work, degraded the Church to a depart- 
ment of the State, and demanded from bishops 
and clergy the acknowledgment of himself 
as " the only supreme head on earth of the 
Church of England ." But it was not to be 
expected that the convictions and sympathies 
of the people would veer round with equal 
suddenpess and rapidity. Though London 
was strongly Protestant, and though the re- 
forming zeal burnt more fiercely than ever in 
the reign of Edward VI., yet the country at 
large received Mary with enthusiasm and joy. 
Both Houses of Parliament united in the 
return to Roman obedience and received the 
Papal absolution upon their knees. They were 
not very conscious that they were changing 
their opinions and faith. But soon they 
learnt what submission to Rome meant ; the 
storm of persecution broke ; the country be- 
held the horrifying spectacle of the Primate 
of all England being burnt at the stake ; for 
the space of three and a half years it lay 
under a veritable nightmare of un-English 
cruelty, burnings, appalling agonies, merciless 
and insane bigotry, and the lesson could not 



SEPARATISTS 



7 



be forgotten. Far into Elizabeth's reign, 
however, in the diocese of York, the people 
kept Romish fasts and festivals and held 
fast by Romish superstitions. Elizabeth, 
on the other hand, by the accident of her 
birth, was bound to resist Rome. If the 
word of the Pope was law, then she was 
illegitimate. But she knew her people. She 
knew that the majority were Catholic. It 
was true, as the Spanish ambassador said, 
that while London and the seaports nearest 
Holland were heretical, yet the Catholic party 
was in a majority. " I will do as my father 
did," she said. She had no scruples, no real 
religious convictions. She wanted a via 
media. This was her sole and only faith, one 
land, one creed, one ritual, one Church, and 
one absolute power on the throne. 

To the average Englishman of the Eliza- 
bethan period there must have seemed much 
to justify such a policy. The threatening 
cloud on the horizon was always the Spanish 
invasion. Spain was the proudest and 
greatest empire in the world. Its armies 
and fleets and argosies, its colonies in the 
distant West, which the imagination pictured 
glittering with gold and precious stones, its 
Inquisition and implacable cruelties, its sieges, 
sacks, and murderous vengeance in the Low 



8 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Countries, were the wonder and terror of the 
time. A Spanish king had been crowned 
King of England, at Westminster. Fresh 
from the auto-da-fe of Granada and Seville, 
he had looked with cold surprise upon the 
hubbub which a few English martyrdoms 
had set up. No Englishman could be sure 
that he would not wake up one day to find 
the Spanish galleons in the Thames, and the 
faggots burning again at Smithfield. It was 
England against Spain all over the world, 
and anything which seemed to divide the 
nation was treason and disloyalty. There- 
fore, whether recusant, or Puritan, or Sepa- 
ratist, all alike felt ere long the pressure of 
the iron will and the strong hand of the 
Tudor Queen. 

The year 1559 is one to be marked in 
English history. The first Parliament of 
Queen Elizabeth passed an Act of Uni- 
formity, one of that dire and miserable 
succession which put temporal gain in the 
place of conscience. It introduced a cleavage 
into our national religious life, which widened 
until the breach became irreparable. It 
prescribed the use of the second Prayer 
Book of Edward VI., " no other or other- 
wise," the penalty of disobedience by the 
clergy being deprivation and imprisonment. 



SEPARATISTS 



9 



Intended at first against the Papist, the penal 
laws of Elizabeth were easily applied to the 
Non-Conformist and Separatist. It is signi- 
ficant in the story of the Separatist that 
penalties were now imposed for non-atten- 
dance at church. Power was given to 
ecclesiastical commissioners to ordain as to 
vestments and ceremonies. Later on, in 
1562, the first Test Act was passed, which 
required the oath of allegiance to the Queen, 
and the disavowal of the Pope from all who 
held secular office as members of Parliament, 
magistrates, or otherwise in the State. After 
the Papal Bull of deposition against Elizabeth 
was launched in 1570 by Pius V., releasing 
her subjects from their civil obedience, the 
range of the statute against high treason was 
greatly enlarged so as to press more heavily 
on Romanists. In May, 1 57 1, the Thirty- 
Nine Articles took their present form, and 
subscription to them was exacted as a wicket- 
gate to all civil authority. Thus, at one 
stroke of the pen, all power in the State, all 
emolument and preferment were rigidly con- 
fined to the members of the Church of 
England. 

As we have seen, these laws and penalties 
were originally directed against Papists, but 
they must all be looked upon as part of the 



10 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



policy of a queen in whom there was no 
bigotry, and very little religious conviction, 
to secure and maintain one people, one Church, 
and one faith. But another party was rising 
in the State. Other foreign influences were 
at work besides those of Rome and Spain. 
The flight of the Marian exiles to the Con- 
tinent and their intercourse with the Pro- 
testant Reformers were destined to bear fruit 
in the most surprising way. Some of them 
came back pledged to the Reformed doctrine 
and practice. They were under the spell of 
the genius of Calvin. They corresponded 
with the reforming leaders of Frankfort, 
Zurich, and Geneva. When controversies 
arose between themselves and Parker or 
Whitgift, they sought the advice of Gualto, 
Bullinger, or Calvin. It is vital to note that 
the Puritans were within the Church of 
England. Many of them not only accepted 
episcopacy but believed in it. The quarrel 
was not yet as to doctrine, it was purely a 
question of music and vestments, of the 
difference between a surplice and the black 
Genevan gown, of ceremonies which were a 
"cloaked papistry or a mingle-mangle." 
Their claim was not for uniformity, but for 
the toleration of such simpler usages and 
dress as seemed good to the party of the 



SEPARATISTS 



XI 



exile. But Archbishop Parker slowly and 
steadily forced upon the English Church one 
ritual and dress, and gave as his ultimatum, 
the surplice, kneeling at the communion, 
and the wafer-bread. The Non-Conformists 
wavered and then yielded, but the battle 
was only begun. It was inevitable that it 
should quickly become a question affecting 
the orders, discipline, and doctrine of the 
State Church. The returned exiles, with the 
pattern of Geneva before them, were not 
willing to regard episcopal ordination as 
essential to the Christian ministry. Every 
fresh act of prelatic aggression, each attempt 
to enforce uniformity and subscription, drove 
them into closer alliance with the Presby- 
terians. To conform became more and more 
difficult. New leaders arose among the 
Puritans. Under Cartwright a system was 
attempted within the Establishment itself, 
which, if successful, would have been the 
farewell to the entire hierarchy. It was 
advocated with a bitterness and bigotry 
which were not surpassed by Rome. The 
six propositions which were sent from Cam- 
bridge to the Chancellor, said to have been 
drawn up by Cartwright himself, did not 
touch questions of ritual or vestment, but 
only the constitution and ministry of the 



12 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Church. A number of the Puritan leaders 
instituted the Presbyterian "Orders of 
Wandsworth," and extended the Presby- 
terian organisation in the very heart of 
the English Church. The answer of Whit- 
gift was the reappointment of the eccle- 
siastical commission for the discipline of 
the Puritans. All the engines which had 
been devised against Romanists were now 
directed against the other wing also in their 
attack upon national unity. The struggle 
was well begun, and its issue was the great 
rebellion and the secession of 1662. 

It seems strange to us that the Puritans 
should have been so resolved to remain in 
the Church of England. Would it not have 
been both braver and wiser for the Non-Con- 
formists to have quitted an organisation with 
which they were in growing antagonism ? 
But we must remember that separation from 
a historic and visible Church was not a 
familiar shape. Every wise man will try if 
possible to reform an institution from the 
inside. Only the weak and violent withdraw 
from a great cause or society, except as a last 
resort. Even the Continental reformers, so 
long as the conflict raged round garments, 
advised the Puritan leaders to conform rather 
than suffer deprivation. Moreover, there 



SEPARATISTS 



13 



must have been the lingering hope in their 
minds that in the final issue their cause would 
triumph. Each crisis in the Church had 
coincided with the accession of a new 
monarch or archbishop. A single generation 
had witnessed the sudden break with Rome ; 
it had seen an archbishop, who had burnt 
a Protestant martyr, himself perish at the 
stake for denying the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation ; the reforming zeal of 
Edward VI. had been followed by the 
Marian recantation and submission ; even 
if Parker and Whitgift had sought to crush 
it, Grindal had smiled upon Puritan usage. 
The question was, what would be its final 
shape when the English Church issued from 
the fires, and Non-Conformists, as they 
began to be called, may be pardoned for 
having cherished the hope that they would 
play a more effective part in the struggle by 
remaining within than by leaving the Church 
of the realm. 

There were some, however, who did not 
take this view of the situation and of their 
duty. There began to be an increasing party 
in the State of those who carried their Non- 
Conformity far beyond the Prayer Book, 
semi-Romish garments, or episcopacy. They 
rejected the Genevan gown. They looked 



14 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



with intense distrust upon the Reformists. 
Some of them denied the right of the civil 
power of kings and magistrates to meddle 
with faith and conscience, or to impose 
any articles or forms of worship upon the 
Church. They taught the doctrine of a 
separate and regenerate Church, in contradis- 
tinction to the mixed parish assemblies of the 
Establishment. It was a portentous spectacle 
when Henry VIII. introduced the right of 
private judgment, as against the colossal 
power of Rome, and you cannot stop a great 
reform just when you have had enough of 
it. Men's thoughts had been prisoned and 
chained for centuries, but they began now to 
expand in a new universe. The Separatists, 
the Baptists, the Brownists, the Barrowists, 
as they were called in contempt, saw plainly 
that the true Church could not be coinci- 
dent with the whole baptized population. 
Despised and proscribed by all, expressly 
excluded from every act of toleration, they 
were yet the children of freedom and light. 

To account for them fully, we must deal 
briefly with certain communities and indi- 
viduals who were precursors and heralds, 
whose work was rudimentary or suggestive, 
but who cannot accurately be termed Baptists 
or Congregationalists. 



SEPARATISTS 



It is entirely unhistorical and misleading to 
confuse the English Baptists with the Ana- 
baptists. That there was an indebtedness no 
one can deny, but they were marked off from 
each other by differences of origin, doctrine, 
social and political ideals. One point of like- 
ness, the rejection of infant baptism, has 
blotted out, for many historical writers, the 
whole field of difference. " It is not fair," 
says Bishop Creighton, "to associate the 
English Baptists with the fanatical sects that 
infested Germany in the early part of the 
sixteenth century." The first appearance of 
these execrated sects in England is in 1535, 
when ten Dutchmen, " who were counted 
for Anabaptists," were burnt in London. 
There were many, however, who came over 
among the refugees as the tide of emigration 
set strongly away from the Low Countries to 
the English shores. They were very numerous 
in Kent, London, and East Anglia. They 
certainly formed Churches at Canterbury, 
Eythorne, Faversham, and elsewhere. Some 
English names occur, but, to quote Williston 
Walker, "they made few direct disciples 
during the sixteenth century on English 
soil." One of the most famous of them, 
Robert Cooke, has been largely ignored 
because he dealt less with baptism than with 



1 6 BAPTIST 6 s CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



predestination, but he was a man of note in 
his day, holding office under Catherine Parr, 
and a courtier as late as 1573. Knox replied 
to him in his Confutation of the Careless by 
Necessities His teaching anticipated the 
views of John Smyth fifty years later. The 
words Anabaptist and Baptist have been 
flung about in the loosest way, and the 
evidence must always be examined. Thus, 
Anne Askew has been called a Baptist, 
though she was simply a Protestant who 
was condemned for denying transubstantia- 
tion ; and Robert Smith, the yeoman of 
the guard, though he accepted the baptism 
of infants if separated from Romish cere- 
monies (Foxe's ActSy 1583 Ed.); and Joan 
Boucher, or Joan of Kent, though she was 
an Anabaptist who was burnt for denying 
that Christ took flesh of the Virgin Mary; 
and the Church at Bocking has been called 
the first Baptist Church in England simply 
because Strype says that a number of persons 
there, " a sort of Anabaptists," met to talk 
about the Bible. The term " Baptist Pioneers " 
is used in this book to denote the English 
Separatists, Congregationalist in Church 
polity and anti-paedobaptist in practice, who 
gave rise to indigenous Churches in this 
country, and with whom the English Baptists 



SEPARATISTS 



17 



of to-day are in historical, theological, and 
spiritual succession. The term Anabaptist 
should be reserved for that semi-social and 
semi-religious movement which took its rise 
in Switzerland out of the death-throes of the 
Peasants' War, spread rapidly over Germany 
and the Netherlands, became sporadic in 
England, and which has been described as 
the " Revolt of the Common Man." Socially, 
it ran to grave excesses at the outset in its 
rejection of civil authority and order. Re- 
ligiously, one distinctive mark of the Ana- 
baptist is always the denial that Christ 
took flesh of the Virgin Mary. Its views, 
in this respect, have never been adopted 
by the English Baptists. After the great 
Congress at Buckholt, in Westphalia, in 1536, 
the learned and pious Frisian priest, Menno 
Simons, rescued from the wreck of Ana- 
baptism its sane and healthy elements, and 
originated the Mennonite Church, with which 
the first English Baptist Churches at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century were in 
communion. The truth is that, while the 
Anabaptists in England raised the question 
of baptism, they were almost entirely a 
foreign importation, an alien element ; and 
the rise of the Baptist Churches was wholly 
independent of them. 

3 



1 8 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Again, it must be borne in mind that there 
was Separatism prior to, and distinct from, 
Congregationalism. First of all, there was 
the Separatism of Queen Mary's reign, which 
was simply Protestant, and amounted to no 
more than a refusal to go to mass, and an 
attempt to continue the use of the second 
Prayer Book of Edward VI. We are in- 
debted to Foxe's Acts and Monuments for 
the story of one such congregation in London. 
The names of its five ministers are given, of 
whom the first became Bishop of Peter- 
borough, and the last Bishop of Coventry 
and Lichfield. John Rough was one of the 
five, and Cuthbert Sympson was a deacon ; 
both were burnt alive, the torture of the rack 
having failed to extract from the deacon the 
list of the members. Rough was a Scotch 
friar, and a friend of Knox, who became an 
English clergyman, having been beneficed at 
Hull by the Lord Protector Somerset. He 
fled to Friesland on the accession of Mary, 
but incautiously returned and joined the 
London Separatists. The Church dissolved 
when Mary died, for the system it desired 
was re-established. It is quite inexcusable 
even to suggest that it was a Congregational 
Church. " That which they add," says 
Robinson in his Justification of Separation^ 



SEPARATISTS 



19 



"of sundry secret congregations in Queen 
Mary's days in many parts of the land is 
but a boast. There were very few of them 
in any. . . . There was not one congregation 
in Queen Mary's days that remained in 
Queen Elizabeth's. The congregations were 
dissolved, and the persons in them bestowed 
themselves in their several parishes, where 
their livings and estates lay." 

A more serious claim, though a mistaken 
one, has been made to discover the origin of 
Congregationalism in the Separatism of the 
early years of Queen Elizabeth. Thus, Dr. 
Stoughton says, "A Congregational Church 
existed in London so early as 1568." Such a 
statement takes a great deal for granted. 
The reference is to the Church of which 
Richard Fitz was a minister, and Bolton a 
deacon, which met, under the guise of a 
wedding, at the Plumbers' Hall, Cannon 
Street, and was broken up in June, 1567. It 
consisted of some persons who were dissatis- 
fied with the " leavings of popery " contained 
in the Prayer Book, and who, disliking the 
religious settlement which Elizabeth had 
made, took the extreme step of Separatism. 
In the Three Articles of their Confession, 
they demanded the preaching of the Word, 
pure sacraments, and a scriptural discipline ; 



20 BAPTIST 6 s CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



probably they meant the Genevan discipline. 
At any rate, they used a Prayer Book which 
had been arranged in Geneva, and examined 
and approved by Calvin himself. Under 
examination before the patient and gentle 
Grindal, they objected to the hierarchy and 
to certain forms of worship. Dr. Dexter 
justly argues that there is no " evidence that 
they had elaborated for themselves any 
system whatsoever." All Puritanism was 
naturally on the verge of Separatism, but 
these - Separatists were not propagandists ; 
they published nothing, they elaborated no 
system of Church polity, and, at once, they 
disappeared from history. 

If we are to understand by the founder of 
modern Congregationalism one who formu- 
lated its principles, expounded its polity, and 
established, by mutual and solemn covenant, 
a particular Church of the Congregational 
order, which was succeeded by others or- 
ganised on the same lines, then we must look 
elsewhere than to these anticipations of an 
approaching dawn. 



II 



ROBERT BROWNE 
L— The Making of a Congre- 

GATIONALIST 

THE supreme importance of Robert 
Browne as a pioneer arises, not from 
the greatness or worth of the man him- 
self, but from the value and vitality of 
the truth which he rediscovered. "That so 
powerful and intelligent a body as the Con- 
gregationalists," says Dr. Jessop, " should 
strive to affiliate themselves to so eccentric 
a person as Browne, . . , will always appear 
somewhat strange to outsiders." But no un- 
biassed student of his strange and stormy 
career could rest his claim to veneration on 
any other ground than that he reached a 
truth which men, vastly superior in character 
and learning, failed to grasp. It was a truth 
no less precious because, in later days, he fell 

21 



22 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



away from his apostleship. The cause he 
championed was not less sacred in that — 
while others, who had "learned his great 
language," witnessed to it by their blood — 
he himself broke " from the van and the free- 
men/' and assumed the livery of the system 
which he had despised. But, at least, it 
should be remembered that he passed within, 
where Luther and Calvin only stood upon 
the threshold ; that, with the genius of an 
ecclesiastical statesman, he formed the first 
Congregational Church on English soil, and 
that, for a time, in spite of suffering and 
imprisonment, he was content to stand alone 
against the religious world of his day, against 
Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan. 

What was the truth which had been lost, 
which Robert Browne found and which can 
never be lost again ? It was the primitive 
doctrine of the Church. It was the return 
to Corinth, Philippi, and Rome. The visible 
Church had come to be regarded as a vast 
historic organisation under a certain form 
of government. It might be a world-wide 
system owning the Roman obedience ; or a 
Church within a geographical area, a national 
Church under the supremacy of the Crown ; 
or it might be Calvin's conception of Church 
government through Presbyters, But the 



ROBERT BROWNE 



23 



issue was everywhere the same. The single, 
individual Church was wiped out. It 
vanished and was denied. The congrega- 
tion or the parish took its place. Even 
Puritanism held that every baptized person, 
not excommunicate, was a member of the 
Church, and looked to the civil magistrate 
to execute its discipline. But Browne re- 
affirmed the New Testament ideal of the 
visible Church. He rediscovered the visible 
society of Jesus. He held that it was re- 
sponsible for its own purity. Later on, we 
shall inquire how far in all this he was 
indebted to the Continental Anabaptists, but 
it is certain that Browne ranks with the 
world's religious pioneers, inasmuch as he 
taught that " the essence, substance, and life 
of the outward Church " was nothing else 
but " the keeping of the covenant by the out- 
ward discipline and government thereof" and 
that neither ministry nor sacraments could 
11 make an outward Church, except they have 
the power of Christ to separate the un- 
worthy." He formed such a separate com- 
pany of believers, self-governing, under the 
authority of Christ. Some of his words ring 
to-day with all the clearness and vehemence 
of battle cries, " Reformation without tarrying 
for any," " Let them know that the Lord's 



24 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



people is of the willing sort." Like every 
true Congregationalist, he was a High 
Churchman. " Yea, the Church hath more 
authority," he said, "concerning Church 
government than magistrates, as it is written 
(Isa. xlv.), 'They shall follow thee and go in 
chains/ " Most pioneers miss their way and 
make serious mistakes, and he was no excep- 
tion to the rule. He was as a man hewing a 
path through a dark, trackless forest and vast 
masses of undergrowth. In himself, as in his 
work, the fine gold was mingled with much 
dross, tlis teaching was sometimes inconsis- 
tent and even halting, but he did that which 
England needed most in his day, and his 
Separatism was the inevitable reaction against 
the identification of the Church and the State. 

Browne came of a family of wealthy 
merchants of which the earliest trace is at 
Stamford in the fourteenth century. His 
ancestors were distinguished by riches and 
liberality, by civic services and honours. 
Three became aldermen of Stamford and 
two were sheriffs of Rutlandshire. One 
founded a hospital for decayed tradesmen, 
and another restored All Saints' Church in 
his native town. His grandfather was entitled 
by special charter of Henry VIII. to remain 
covered in the presence of king and lords. 



ROBERT BROWNE 



25 



The fragment of family history which had 
the chief bearing on his career was the 
marriage of his great-uncle with an aunt 
of Lord Burghley. Robert was born at the 
family manor of Tolethorpe, two miles from 
Stamford, about 1550, and was the third of 
seven children of Anthony Browne, " a man 
of some countenance," and his wife Dorothy, 
daughter of Sir Philip Boteler. 

It is uncertain of which college he became 
a member when he went to Cambridge in 
1570, but it is probable that, after his matricu- 
lation, he migrated to Corpus Christi, where 
he graduated in 1572, being placed eighteenth 
on the list. He may have been drawn to 
Corpus by early theological sympathies, as 
the celebrated Puritan leader, Thomas 
Aldrich, had been appointed master of the 
college in 1569. Two men destined to play 
an important part in the story were at Cam- 
bridge at this time. Thomas Cartwright was 
made Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity 
in 1569, and attracted crowds of students by 
his fiery genius and dialectic skill, until he 
was deprived of his post in 1571. Perhaps 
Browne's animus against Cartwright and his 
teaching began already. Robert Harrison, 
afterwards co-pastor at Norwich and Middle- 
berg, had removed from St. John's to Corpus 



26 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Christi, and was now a fellow-student and 
acquaintance of Browne. Nothing further 
is known of the period spent by him at the 
university, except that he was counted so 
" forward in religion " that he aroused sus- 
picions and made some enemies by his zeal. 
Strype's statement that he was domestic 
chaplain to Thomas Howard, Duke of 
Norfolk, is inherently improbable. The 
duke was at this very time deeply impli- 
cated with the Papist party, and it is almost 
ludicrous to suppose that his chaplain should 
be this youthful and budding Separatist, who 
was not even in orders. Dr. Jessop suggests 
that "Strype has confused Robert Browne 
with " Brown, the Shrewsbury merchant, " im- 
plicated when the Ridolfi conspiracy was 
discovered." But the latter's connection with 
the plot and with the duke was so slight and 
accidental as to make this very unlikely. On 
the completion of his course Browne gave 
himself for the space of three years to the 
teaching of children. Report has it that the 
school of which he became a master was at 
Southwark, and that he also preached in the 
Gravel Pits at Islington. "By the grudge of 
his enemies " he was discharged from his 
office, but continued still to teach privately 
until, driven away by the severity of the 



ROBERT BROWNE 



27 



plague, he returned to his father's house in 
1578. 

We enter now upon the period in Robert 
Browne's history in which, with unaffected 
earnestness and passionate longing, he sought 
to find the light and to follow it. Good men 
may differ as to the conclusions which he 
reached, but his sincerity and overwhelming 
desire to bring about a reformation of religion 
are not open to question. He had always 
been set on the Church of God, and now 
resolved to seek its profit in the best way he 
could. His first step, then, was to leave the 
quiet haven at Tolethorpe and to go back to 
Cambridge. He became a member of the 
household of a Puritan clergyman at Dry 
Drayton, the Rev. Richard Greenham. This 
good " preaching minister " was one of those 
who remained loyal to the Church of England, 
but clung resolutely to simplicity of dress and 
worship. It is a beautiful picture which we 
get of the life within this sixteenth-century 
manse and parish, the regular and frequent 
preaching, the teaching of children, the early 
service, as soon as the dawn broke, that the 
labourers might hear the Word, the morning 
and evening prayers in the home, the 
Christian instruction of the servants, the 
daily charities, the young men whom he 



28 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



gathered round him and cared for. He 
was such an one as Chaucer's poor parson 
who taught Christ's lore, " and first he fol- 
lowed it himself." Into this idyllic scene, 
the young enthusiast came, in 1578, with 
many thoughts and hopes. What these 
thoughts and purposes were, he himself tells 
us in A True and Short Declaration. Even 
while he had been a teacher of children in 
Southwark, he had been sore grieved at the 
woful and lamentable state of the Church, 
and had given himself wholly to search out 
the proper guidance and order of the Church 
and the abuses in ecclesiastical government. 
" Night and day he did consult with himself 
and others about them." But when he 
entered into Mr. Greenham's home, his con- 
victions rapidly became clear and positive. 
He saw that the voice of the Church, that is, 
the voice of the whole people, was the voice 
of God, so that next under Christ was not the 
bishop, not even an apostle, but the Church. 
The primacy of the Church he judged not 
only to be " against the wickedness of the 
bishops,but also against their whole power and 
authority." The bishops, in forcing ministers 
upon the people, presumed further than 
Christ, Who would not suffer His apostles to 
take charge of any who did not willingly 



ROBERT BROWNE 



29 



receive them. Evidently Browne was on the 
high road to Congregationalism. We can 
almost hear the long debates in the manse at 
Dry Drayton. Mr. Greenham had doubtless 
listened to Cartwright in the Lady Margaret 
lectures, and would urge, as he did, that since 
the bishops both preached the Word of God 
and had the Sacraments, they must needs 
have the Church and the people of God. 
The persistent objector would reply that to 
preach the Word of God " as it is written in 
Jeremiah xxiii. 22 99 was to teach the people 
" those things whereby they might turn them 
from their evil ways." As the bishops did 
not call the people from their sins, but rather 
led them in the same, they did not preach 
the Word of God. At his first coming to 
Dry Drayton, the young Browne began to 
expound the Scriptures, which were read at 
the manse table after meals. Then Mr. 
Greenham, without leave of the bishop, 
suffered him to teach openly in his parish. 
His gifts were evident, and, with the consent 
of the mayor and vice-chancellor of the uni- 
versity, he took charge of the Benet Church 
in Cambridge for six months. 

Obviously, the natural course for so earnest 
and gifted a preacher was to obtain the 
bishop's license, but he was resolved not to 



30 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



seek this authority. Dr. Jessop is mistaken 
in thinking that he must have been ordained 
at an earlier period. " To be authorised of 
them " (the bishops), " to be sworn, to sub- 
scribe, to be ordained, and to receive their 
licensing, he utterly misliked and kept himself 
clear in those matters." He refused the 
bishop's seals, which were obtained for him 
by his brother. He openly preached in 
Cambridge against " the calling and author- 
ising of preachers by bishops." He came to 
the conclusion " that the kingdom of God 
was not to be begun by whole parishes, but 
rather of the worthiest, were they never so 
few." He refused the stipend which the 
Benet Church sent to him. But the bishop 
and council saw in him a dangerous man, 
and he was inhibited from preaching. The 
labours, mental conflicts, and spiritual agita- 
tions of the past six months laid him low. 
It was borne in upon his mind that hitherto 
the Lord had only tried and prepared him 
"to a further and more effectual message." 
With many tears he sought where he might 
find those like-minded with himself. He had 
reached the turning point of his career. The 
Lord was about to set before him an open 
door. 

Two events now occurred of vital moment 



ROBERT BROWNE 



31 



and far-reaching consequences, which, in 
reality, determined his ecclesiastical course. 
One was his visit to Middleberg, in Zeeland. 
Until recently there has been no confirmation 
of Fuller's statement that Browne " perched 
himself " in the city of Norwich after his 
visit to the Low Countries. Biographers 
have unanimously assigned the visit to 
Zeeland to a later date ; but the story of 
this period must be re-written in the light of 
a recent discovery by Mr. Champlin Burrage 
in the British Museum. On February 19, 
1 589 (New Style), Bancroft quoted in his 
sermon at St. Paul's Cross a few passages 
from some writings of Robert Browne, of 
which all trace was lost. It was supposed 
that Bancroft had in his possession a treatise 
by Browne, but in 1903, Mr. Burrage, search- 
ing in the British Museum, lighted upon 
twelve folio pages beautifully and compactly 
written, containing Bancroft's quotation, 
which proved to be a letter by Browne to 
his uncle, Mr. Flower, written January 10, 
1 589 (N. S.). In this letter we read these 
words : " Before my first voyage beyond 
the sea and since my last return." It is 
probable, therefore, that Browne went to 
Zeeland twice, first in 1579, or 1580, for a 
Uttle while, and again in 1581. The version 



32 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



which quaint old Fuller gives of the first 
journey is somewhat prejudiced, "Browne 
went over into Zeeland to purchase himself 
more reputation from foreign parts. For a 
smack of travail gives an high taste to strange 
opinions, making them better relish to the 
licourish lovers of novelty." It was quite 
natural that, in this time of his mental and 
spiritual agitation, Browne's thoughts should 
turn to Holland, which through the successful 
rebellion against Alva's rule, was the only 
spot ia Europe where religious liberty and 
equal toleration could be found, and here 
perhaps he would worship with Cartwright's 
Puritan congregation. He would converse 
with Dutch Anabaptists, and would no doubt 
hear much of the Dutch congregation in the 
city of Norwich. 

The other important and formative event 
in his career was the visit to Norwich, that 
ancient and beautiful city, then one of the 
first cities of the kingdom, which was to 
be the birthplace of Congregationalism. 
Already it had opened its gates to the skilled 
and thrifty exiles of Alva's infamous mas- 
sacres. In 1587, the Dutch and Walloons, 
numbering 4,679, formed a majority of the 
population. In London, the Dutch con- 
gregation was under the care of the Bishop 



ROBERT BROWNE 



33 



of London, and serious complaints were 
lodged that it included many Anabaptists. 
So in Norwich, the Dutch, by consent of 
the bishop, would worship in the Black- 
friars' Hall, still called the Dutch Church, 
and would likewise be infected with the 
Anabaptist heresy. It was partly through 
the influence of Robert Harrison that the 
visit was paid. Browne's sometime fellow- 
student had left Corpus Christi to be master 
of the county school at Aylsham, and was 
now the master of the Old Man's Hospital in 
Norwich. This charity occupies the church 
originally dedicated to St. Giles, but is called 
St. Helen's to avoid confusion with St. Giles' 
Church in the west of the city. St. Helen's 
Church itself disappeared after the Reforma- 
tion. Harrison had paid a flying visit to 
Cambridge, intending to seek license from the 
bishop, but was dissuaded by Robert Browne, 
with whom he renewed his acquaintance, and 
who regarded the bishop's authority as " trash 
and pollution." Shortly afterwards, Browne 
"took his voyage" to Norwich and lodged 
with Harrison. They walked much together 
in the fields talking of religion. Harrison 
was no match for the powerful and over- 
bearing personality of Browne, and at last 
* wholly yielded to the truth." They talked 

4 



34 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



of the lordship and government of Christ, 
and whether they could be lawful pastors 
who had submitted themselves to the bishops, 
of the ways also by which men could find 
salvation and Christian assurance. Harrison 
made a stout resistance before he would give up 
the true ministry of some Puritan preachers, 
but afterwards he admitted them to be " like 
their fellows." The fact is that Browne 
would not suffer him to have an opinion of 
his own. For example, they compared their 
Christian experience and "how faith was 
tried and wrought in them." Harrison 
argued that faith might be wrought by 
reading the Scriptures, but Browne said that 
this could not be, but only by hearing the 
Word preached, as Paul saith, " How shall 
they believe in Him of Whom they have not 
heard, and how shall they hear without a 
preacher ? " This did not mean hearing the 
Word read, for Paul saith that, " Faith cometh 
by hearing and hearing by the Word of God," 
meaning the message in the mouth of the 
preacher. In vain Harrison urged that he 
was first called as he was reading the Bible, 
for he was answered that, " we may be 
deceived in such things," and after this he 
surrendered at discretion. 

It was, then, under the very shadow of the 



ROBERT BROWNE 



35 



cathedral and the bishop's palace, perhaps in 
Robert Browne's room at the hospital, that 
the first Congregational Church in England 
was formed in 1580 or 1 58 1. It was a 
tremendous act. It was a solemn hour, 
fraught with big destinies. The grim spectre 
of persecution and exile hung darkly above 
that little company, and yet around them 
was the glory of a new beginning for England 
and even for the world. Ignorant of much, 
sharing to the full in the intolerance of their 
time, this little branch of Christ's people saw 
clearly that the stained, fettered Church of 
England was not God's way, and to them 
was the unspeakable honour of bringing back 
the rights of the people of God. 

Browne had thought long and deeply on 
the principles of Congregationalism, and it is, 
therefore, both interesting and important to 
see the manner of the planting of this Church. 
A day was set, a covenant made, and certain 
points were proved to the people from the 
Scriptures. " They promised their agree- 
ment to each thing particularly, saying, 1 To 
this we give our consent.' " The terms of 
the covenant were chiefly these — they joined 
themselves to the Lord, and elected those 
who should watch for their souls, promising 
them obedience. They adopted an order 



36 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



for receiving any into fellowship and for 
separating the unworthy, and they engaged 
specially to warn and rebuke one another 
privately and openly. Church discipline 
proved to be to them, as later to so many, 
a rock of offence. 

It should be carefully noted that Robert 
Browne taught that the officers of the par- 
ticular Church were the Pastor, the Teacher, 
the Elders, the Deacons, and the Widows. 
Moreover, Congregationalism, as it was con- 
ceived 'and planned by him, had a place not 
only for the particular Church, but also for 
the association of Churches together for com- 
mon ends. In the True and Short Declara- 
tioti) he wrote, " For the joining and partaking 
of many Churches together, and of the autho- 
rity which many have, must needs be greater 
and more weighty than the authority of any 
single person." Again, in The Book which 
Sheweth, we read, " Who have the grace and 
office of teaching and guiding ? Some have 
their several charge over many Churches. 
Some have charge but in one Church only. 
How have some their charge and office to- 
gether ? There be synods or the meetings of 
sundry Churches : which are when the weaker 
Churches seek help of the stronger, for de- 
ciding or redressing of matters : or else the 



ROBERT BROWNE 



37 



stronger look to them for redress." He 
defined a synod thus, " A synod is a joining 
or partaking of the authority of many 
Churches met together in peace for redress 
and deciding of matters which cannot well 
be otherwise taken up." There has been an 
extreme Brownism, as there has been an 
extreme Calvinism, but selfish independency 
cannot shelter itself under the authority of 
the founder of Congregationalism. 

The question has been hotly debated how 
far Robert Browne was an original discoverer, 
and to what extent he was indebted to the 
Anabaptists. It is almost certain, in spite of 
the contrary view held by Dexter, that he 
owed something to the Dutch Anabaptists. 
He had conversed with them in Zeeland, 
and in Norwich he had been in the midst of 
a large Dutch community. His thoughts 
were first drawn to Norwich because he had 
heard that there were some in that city who 
shared his convictions and sentiments. In 
his anxious consultations by day and night, 
Browne must have become acquainted with 
their views. His fundamental conception of 
the covenant was the Anabaptists' conception. 
Mr. Champlin Burrage, in his work, The 
Church Covenant Idea^ has pointed out that, 
twenty-five years earlier, an Anabaptist book 



38 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



was printed in English which affirmed the 
principle of particular Churches and laid 
emphasis on the covenant. Yet Browne was 
an independent thinker. He rejected the 
extreme tenets of the Anabaptists as to 
oaths, civil officers, and also their views on 
Baptism, and must in the fullest sense be 
regarded as a radical religious reformer. 

II.— Apostleship and Apostasy. 

The period of inquiry and speculation was 
ended. Browne had crossed the line, and 
he gave himself to the new propaganda 
with the fervour and energy of an apostle. 
Hearing that at Bury St. Edmunds there 
were many "forward in religion," he went 
thither with his " arrogant spirit of reproof " 
and his fiery denunciation of the bishops. 
At the instance of " certain godly preachers," 
he was arrested and cast into prison for the 
first time. This was the beginning of his 
thirty-two imprisonments. The prison in 
those days was the scene of inevitable misery 
and horror, in which the unhappy victim was 
herded with the vilest scum and dregs of 
humanity. Often he was left to rot and 
perish in a dungeon cell so dark that he 
could not see his own hand. The Bishop of 



ROBERT BROWNE 



39 



Norwich complained to Lord Burghley that 
Browne had already seduced "the vulgar 
sort of people," who assembled themselves 
together to the number of a hundred to hear 
him. We can well believe that, but for the 
intervention of his powerful kinsman, the 
bishop would have made short work of this 
" troublesome man," as Fuller calls him, but 
at Burghley's request he was released. He 
at once returned to Bury St. Edmunds, 
again to preach and again to be arrested. 
This time he was incarcerated in London. 

Meanwhile, the little company at Norwich, 
of which Browne was the Pastor, and Robert 
Harrison the Teacher, were sore beset and 
meditated flight to Scotland or to Jersey or 
Guernsey. Browne, from his prison, wrote to 
them not to go till they had further testified 
the truth ; but at last, when some were in 
prison and the rest of them grievously perse- 
cuted, they all " were fully persuaded that 
the Lord did call them out of England." 
The bond of Church fellowship was very real. 
They migrated as a company in the autumn 
of 1581 to Middleberg. 

And if the story could have ended here, it 
would have been well. The bright morning 
star was soon to be quenched in blackness 
and ruin. The exaggerated importance 



40 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



which Browne attached to " warning and 
rebuking, privately and publicly/' gives force 
to the sharp criticism of Dr. Jessop, " It was 
to be a society ... for a miraculously gifted 
few." On the one hand, was a Church with- 
out discipline, and on the other, a separated 
Church with a censorship which flagrantly 
violated Christ's word, " Judge not, that ye be 
not judged." The little company, which had 
set out to reform the Church of God, ended 
in sordid strife, backbiting and jealousy, 
failure and apostasy. The grave peril of the 
Church is to forget that the " fruit of the 
Spirit is love." 

At first it would appear that Robert 
Harrison and the Church joined themselves 
to the Puritan colony at Middleberg, of 
which Cartwright was the distinguished 
minister. Perhaps Browne had not yet 
arrived, and it is probable that, when his 
influence was felt, the Separatists withdrew. 
A letter, temperate, if not convincing, was 
addressed to Harrison by Cartwright, inviting 
him to return. Browne replied to it in a 
pamphlet ten times its length. He published 
the two letters, putting his own reply first, 
with the naive explanation that "if an un- 
truth be once received it worketh such a 
prejudice in the head." In this corre- 



ROBERT BROWNE 



41 



spondence Browne showed at his very worst 
as a controversialist He poured torrents of 
abuse upon Cartwright for his "fond and 
blasphemous " notions, and twisted his argu- 
ments about until they were unrecognis- 
able. 

The story of the Church at Middleberg is 
set down at some length in the True and 
Short Declaration. The members became 
estranged from their pastor, and when he 
fell sick, " they made ado secretly." Meet- 
ings were called at which accusations were 
made against Browne, who privately rebuked 
Harrison, telling him that he knew several 
things against him if he liked to speak. 
There was great confusion at the Church 
meetings, and Browne insisted that one 
matter at a time should be debated and 
judged before another was raised. He was 
condemned as an unlawful pastor. There 
was some paltry question about a silver 
spoon. Browne resigned, but was brought 
back again, and, in an open meeting, each 
one confessed his fault. Again, and yet 
again, was Robert Browne condemned by the 
Church. There were whisperings and mur- 
murings. Robert Browne's wife had her 
share in the disputes. He was charged with 
divers heresies, and at last shook off the dust 



42 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



of his feet against the Church and, with a 
little remnant, set sail for Scotland. 

Harrison was left behind as the pastor of 
the Church. He published some Forms of 
Catechism and a small treatise, but he dis- 
appears now from the story, and after his 
death in August, 1 594, the Church at Middle- 
berg was broken up and ceased to be. 

During the two years spent at Middleberg, 
Browne issued from the press three treatises 
as an exposition of his views. 

1. A< Treatise of Reformation without 
Tarrying for Anie. 

2. A Treatise upon the 23 of Matthewe. 

3. A Book which Sheweth the Life and 
Manners of all True Christians. 

These treatises were printed both separately 
and together, and, being circulated in England, 
were honoured by a special proclamation 
against them from the Queen in June, 1583, 
and, in the same month, Elias Thacker and 
John Coppin were hanged at Bury St. 
Edmunds for effecting their distribution. As 
early as 1576, Coppin had refused to have 
his child baptized by an " unpreaching 
minister," and had also declined to have 
godfathers and godmothers. But the offence 
through which they became the first martyrs 
of Congregationalism was, that they had 



ROBERT BROWNE 



43 



been great dispersers of Browne's pam- 
phlets. 

The student will turn to the Book which 
Sheweth for the best exposition of the 
grounds on which Browne separated from 
and reformed the Church, as well as for the 
most systematic account of his theology. It 
is a work of real insight, arranged in a series 
of questions and answers with definitions and 
divisions. The author states, with a pardon- 
able pride, "As for the learned who seek 
deepness and stand in their methods and 
curious divisions, we have for their case taken 
some pains." Congregationalism arose partly 
in opposition to the episcopal form of govern- 
ment in the Church of England, but much 
more as a protest against the complete 
obliteration of the distinction between the 
Church and the world. It weighed like an 
agonising burden upon the heart of Browne 
that the only local Church was the parish as- 
sembly, and that, to the Lord's table, the most 
unworthy might come. This clearly was not 
the New Testament way. " There is a circu- 
lation, as in the fashion of clothes, so of 
opinion," says Fuller, and he adds that Dr. 
Fulke proved the Brownists to be the same 
as the ancient Donatists. The statement is 
historically incorrect, and is made in radical 



44 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



ignorance of Donatism ; but at any rate 
Browne's teaching was not to be brushed 
aside as an old heresy. Among secondary 
points, the reader will notice that Browne 
held that, in baptism, the body was to be 
washed, sprinkled, or dipped, in which he 
was probably in agreement with the earlier 
modern Baptists. He taught, however, that 
the children of the faithful were members of 
the Church through the promise, and should 
be presented for baptism. 

Dr. Dexter has said that Robert Browne 
is entitled to the proud pre-eminence of 
having been the first writer clearly to state 
and defend in the English tongue the true — 
and now accepted — doctrine of the relation 
of the magistrate to the Church. " It is a 
great claim, but before we reject the contrary 
opinion of Professor Masson, it will be neces- 
sary to examine the facts very carefully. 
There can be no doubt that Browne ex- 
pressly excluded the magistrate from the 
control or discipline of the Church. He 
declared that the magistrates " have no 
ecclesiastical authority at all M ; and again, 
" they may do nothing concerning the 
Church, but only civil and as civil magis- 
trates ; . . . that is, concerning the outward 
provision and outward justice, they are to 



ROBERT BROWNE 



45 



look to it ; but to compel religion, to plant 
churches by power and to force a submission 
to Ecclesiastical government by laws and 
penalties, belongeth not to them, as is proved 
before, neither yet to the Church." This 
appears most satisfactory. There are, how- 
ever, other passages which lead us to 
suspect that Browne was feeling his way to 
religious liberty, but was not always consis- 
tent with himself. Thus we find, " If, then, the 
magistrate will command the soldier to be a 
minister, or the preacher to give over his 
calling, they ought not to obey him, for they 
have not the gift, and God hath called them 
this way rather than that, yet if a magistrate 
call one of a lower calling to a higher, to that 
which he is fit and prepared, he ought to 
obey, for God hath called him thereto." 
This seems to bring the magistrate back 
again, but really the question has been 
settled by the discovery of the long-lost 
letter to Mr. Flower, to which we have 
already referred. In this letter Browne 
declares, " If, then, it be demanded who 
shall call and consecrate ministers, excom- 
municate and put down false teachers, let the 
word of God answer, which appointeth the 
chiefest and most difficult matters to be 
judged by them of chiefest authority and gifts 



46 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



... I answer that the civil magistrates have 
their right in all causes to judge and set 
order." Later on, while still maintaining 
that the godly alone should choose the 
minister, he would admit the civil magistrate 
to be both present and director of the choice. 
It is true that these words were written two 
years after his subscription to the Church of 
England, but it is more than probable that, in 
this private letter, he expressed his real and 
unchanged opinion. 

To rfeturn to the story. As we have seen, 
Browne left Middleberg towards the close of 
1 583, with a few faithful followers, and sailed 
for Scotland. Having dealt faithfully with the 
English Church without much apparent suc- 
cess, he now turned his attention to Presby- 
terianism in its citadel and Vatican. He 
made his way from Dundee to St Andrews ; 
thence, armed with a letter from Andrew 
Melville, on to Edinburgh. From the 
Canongate he made his assault upon the 
Church of John Knox, chiefly for its lack of 
discipline. Presbyterianism, however, was in 
no mood to be reformed. Browne was at 
once cited before the Kirk session. On 
January 21, 1584, he urged that "the whole 
discipline of Scotland was amiss," and ap- 
pealed to the magistrate. He was promptly 



ROBERT BROWNE 



47 



clapped into the common gaol, and a report 
on his heresies sent to the King. But state- 
craft just then was not favourable to Scot- 
land, and the order came for his release. He 
carried his message to other parts of the 
country, and then returned to England. His 
impressions of Scotland were naturally very 
unfavourable, and, in the letter to Mr. Flower, 
he gave as his judgment that, under the 
name of Presbyter, a pope or proud popeling 
might be hid, and that if Parliament should 
exchange bishop for presbyter, " instead of 
one pope we should have a thousand, and of 
some lord bishops in name a thousand lordly 
tyrants in deed." This passage may have 
been in Milton's thoughts when he wrote — 

u New Presbyter is but old priest writ large." 

Browne added that he had travelled much 
in Scotland, and had " seen all manner of 
wickedness to abound, much more in their 
best places in Scotland, than in our worser 
places here in England," and, with a hint at 
his sufferings, " in England also I have found 
much more wrong done me by the preachers 
of discipline than by any of the bishops." 

In July, 1584, we find Browne in London. 
Probably he now wrote the True and Short 
Declaration. In a letter from Burghley to 



48 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Browne's father, dated October 8, 1584, it 
would appear that he had been arrested by 
the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury on 
the charge of writing a certain book, but that 
he had been dealt with leniently on Burgh- 
ley's intervention. There is much warrant 
for Fuller's description of his treatment as 
"extraordinary favour indulged unto him." 
He returned to the old home at Tolethorpe 
a broken and disappointed man. But his 
father soon wearied of his company. M Men 
may wish — God only can work — children to 
be good." Browne was removed to Stam- 
ford, and, in the spring of 1586, went to 
Northampton to preach and labour with 
something of the old fervour and energy. 
He was cited for trial by the Bishop of 
Peterborough, and failing to appear, was 
"excommunicated for contempt." 

But the end of Browne's Separatism was 
at hand. Having given his assent to the 
doctrines of the Church of England, he was 
appointed master of St. Olave's Grammar 
School, South wark, on November 21, 1586, 
and signed strict articles in the Governor's 
Minute Book not to meddle with the 
ministry or keep any conventicles, to take 
the children to church, and to commune 
himself. There is little further to record. 



ROBERT BROWNE 



49 



On the 15th of April, 1590, he wrote a 
singular letter to Lord Burghley, enclosing 
some Latin tables and definitions, in which 
he based all the rules of art and learning on 
the Word of God. In 1591, through the 
influence of Burghley, he became rector of 
Achurch-cum-Thorpe, in Northamptonshire. 
Here he ministered for forty years. He was 
married twice, and nine children were born 
to him. He kept the parish register with 
the utmost care, except between September, 
1617, and June, 1626, but it appears that 
there was a preacher or licensed curate in 
the parish continuously from 1604 to 1627. 
Some of the entries in Browne's handwriting 
illustrate his originality : — 

"July, 1604. Marie Hobson an ould-poore 
maied." 

" 1629, Nov. 7. A childe of my own 
gracious Godsonne Robert Green Baptized 
elsewere in Schisme." 

He sometimes preached in a little thatched 
house at Thorpe, where perhaps he still 
taught his particular principles of Church 
polity, not being allowed to do so in the 
parish Church. 

Of this period many libellous stories are 
told. Fuller professes often to have seen 
him when a youth, and adds, " He had in 

5 



SO BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



my time a wife with whom for many years 
he never lived, and a church where he never 
preached." But probably this, together with 
Bailey's charge that he beat his poor old wife 
and called her a " cursed old woman," is an 
infamous libel. The last entry by him in the 
parish register is dated June 2, 163 1. 

His end was tragic. He struck a constable 
who had somewhat roughly demanded the 
payment of a rate, and being summoned 
before the magistrate for the offence, was 
committed to Northampton gaol. The un- 
happy old man was more than eighty years 
of age, corpulent, and unwieldy. A feather 
bed was thrown upon a cart, and so he was 
taken to prison. For the last time he was 
to hear the clang of the prison door behind 
him, and on some date, not known with 
exactitude, but prior to November, 1633, the 
passionate spirit burnt itself out. Fuller 
records that he was buried in a neighbour- 
ing churchyard, and adds, " It is no hurt to 
wish that his bad opinions had been interred 
with him." 

The problem of Robert Browne is insoluble. 
He carried the secret of his recantation with 
him to the grave. Never was any man more 
unfortunate in his public career. He was 
resolute and unresting in his search for the 



ROBERT BROWNE 



51 



truth, but he left it to others to be its 
apostles, to suffer exile and death on its 
behalf, and to face the inevitable conse- 
quences of its acceptance. His attitude 
towards Episcopacy had been one of un- 
measured hatred and contempt, and it is 
difficult to believe that he ever really 
altered his opinions in this respect. This 
hatred was requited with equal virulence. 
" Hence the Church of England," said Bishop 
Hall, in his reply to the Brownists, "justly 
matches Separatists with the vilest persons. 
God Himself doeth so." From the other side 
of the controversy the Congregational martyrs 
regarded him with loathing and scorn. " We 
are not Brownists," said Barrow, before his 
judges. " Browne is an apostate," said Green- 
wood, " now one of your Church." For forty 
years the great pioneer of Israel's freedom 
led the people of God out of the bondage of 
Egypt, through the wilderness, sharing their 
struggles, sacrifices, and perils, counting it 
enough that God was his refuge and dwelling- 
place ; living in the future, not the present ; 
sustained by the vision of a purified and 
redeemed Israel, and of a promised land 
when the first generation had passed away 
But Robert Browne, as the darkness deepened, 
stole back silently from the Host of God 



52 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



which he had led into the wilderness, and, 
in the safety of an obscure rectory, for forty 
years, watched the tragic procession of events, 
and gave no sign. He lived on through that 
dark time of the struggle for freedom against 
king and bishops, while those who had 
been inspired by his words were hung or 
banished from the realm. Many have been 
the attempts to explain this recreancy, and 
probably the answer is not to be found in 
any single direction. It has been suggested 
that he had never contemplated being cast 
out of the Church of England, and that, when 
the limit of patience was reached, he hesi- 
tated and drew back. It has been urged 
that, beneath the strain of repeated im- 
prisonment, mental agitation, and disappoint- 
ing conflict with his own brethren, the highly 
strung and intense nature gave way ; that 
Congregationalism had the pioneer, bold as 
a lion, keen and penetrating and mighty in 
the Scriptures, and that Anglicanism had 
the physical and mental wreck, the half- 
deranged and wholly terrified apostate. It 
is clear from the letter to Mr. Flower that 
the poor broken creature, like an animal 
which has been cruelly tortured, cowered at 
the possibility of again being flung into the 
dark and noisome dungeon. But, in spite of 



ROBERT BROWNE 



S3 



all that may justly be laid to the score of 
mental derangement, we believe that he had, 
in fact, lost faith in the value of Congrega- 
tionalism as a practical and working theory 
of the Church. He felt that it was not worth 
dying for. We freely admit that the Congre- 
gationalism of the Church at Middleberg was 
not worth any sacrifice, and that it carried 
with it no spiritual enrichment for the world. 
It crumbled away beneath his hand, and he 
left it in ruins. It was Congregationalism 
with love left out, and in which liberty had 
become the cloak of maliciousness ; and just 
as the corruption of the best is always the 
worst corruption, so Congregationalism, 
which has its very essence in the life of 
God within the soul, in love and kindness 
and every fruit of the spirit, when it parts 
from these saving elements, loses its savour, 
and is only fit to be cast out and trodden 
under foot of men. 



Ill 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 

L— Prisoners of Jesus Christ 
~^HE story of the martyrs of Separatism 



X must be read in the light of that 
rigid and narrow conformity which now 
became the persistent and resolute policy 
of the Church of England. Elizabeth was 
determined to rule both in Church and State, 
and in her intense dislike of any deviation 
from appointed forms, she had a ready, 
relentless, and convinced agent in Arch- 
bishop Whitgift. The severity of his ad- 
ministration can scarcely be extenuated by 
the fact that it was a time of theological 
bitterness and bigotry in which no party was 
prepared to extend toleration to any other. 
It might well have been remembered by 
Whitgift that his immediate predecessor, 
Grindal, had been compelled to fly to the 




54 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 



55 



Continent to escape the Marian fires, and 
that he himself had only dared to take orders 
when the danger had passed away. But the 
issue of this policy was to drive the bark of 
the Church straight upon the rocks and to 
involve the State in revolution. Could any 
other result have come about ? The time 
was one of extraordinary richness, strength, 
and complexity. Never in the history of 
England did men so feel the breath of 
liberty, the impulse to new thought and 
action, or so claim the free play of the con- 
fident, unfettered mind. The material and 
intellectual prosperity of the country reached 
their meridian during the reign of Elizabeth. 
The daring spirit of exploration was illustrated 
in Willoughby, who perished on the coast 
of Lapland ; in Frobisher, who made three 
voyages to find the North-West Passage ; and 
in Drake, who put a girdle round the globe. 
English prose took a statelier and grander 
form in the writings of Sidney, Bacon, and 
pre-eminently of Hooker. In poetry, the 
great names of Spenser and Shakespeare 
stand out from all the rest. In this larger 
air, it was a fatal act of folly to seek to force 
the life of the Church into narrow moulds, 
to fine and banish the Puritan and to fling 
the Separatist into a filthy dungeon. Even 



56 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Rome had been more flexible than Canter- 
bury, for it had permitted the Use of Sarum, 
Hereford, or York. The immediate effect 
was that multitudes of Englishmen began 
to ask themselves whether it was for this that 
they had thrown off the yoke of Rome, and, 
with the memories of St. Bartholomew's Day 
burning in their hearts, whether it was not 
better to make a clean sweep of Papistry in 
the worship of the Church. Indeed, Burghley 
thought that the procedure of Whitgift was 
" too much savouring of the Romish In- 
quisition." Puritanism rapidly widened its 
demands, and instead of mild protests against 
the sign of the Cross in baptism and the 
ring in marriage, attacked the whole Con- 
stitution of the Church, while the Separatist 
from his prison cell sent forth his rough, 
biting, fiery words throughout the land. 
Hooker's method of grave and dignified 
reasoning might have averted the danger 
had it come earlier, but when he wrote, 
already it seemed to him that Anglicanism 
might " pass away as in a dream." The folly 
of persecution has never been more clearly 
shown. Whitgift sowed the wind and the 
next generation reaped the whirlwind. 

Whitgift is so conspicuous a figure in the 
ecclesiastical struggles of the time that it is 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 



57 



almost unnecessary to ask what he was and 
what he did. Macaulay describes him in his 
essay on Francis Bacon as " a narrow-minded, 
mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power 
by servility and adulation." It is strangely 
true, however, that, in spite of these qualities, 
he was devoted to the good of the Church as 
he conceived it, and, when unopposed, could 
be affable, gentle, and patient. He had not 
the simplicity or learning of Grindal, who 
scrupled to suppress " prophesyings " or to 
command the clergy to wear surplices, and 
whose firm reminder to Elizabeth that even 
princes were " accountable to God " so exas- 
perated her that she sequestered him from 
his office. Whitgift moved in pride and state 
through the world of his day, rich by private 
fortune and also through the sinecures and 
pluralities which he held. His pedantic in- 
tellect was fully convinced that Episcopacy 
was essential to the order and peace of the 
land. His courage and resolution were 
almost boundless. He flinched once before 
Elizabeth and grovelled before James I., but 
he defied Leicester and even the great Cecil 
He was no match in eloquence or learning 
for his chief protagonist, Cartwright, but he 
expelled him from the university, and later 
put him in prison for not taking the ex-officio 



5 8 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



oath. Step by step he advanced the rigour 
of Conformity and the ecclesiastical powers 
of the High Commission. He would make 
no truce with Puritanism. Theologically, he 
was a Calvinist, but Elizabeth compelled him 
to waive unity of doctrine and to insist only 
on matters of discipline. He secured the 
enforcement of the famous Three Articles 
in which every minister was required to 
subscribe to the royal supremacy in things 
spiritual as well as temporal, and to pledge 
himself to an unqualified assent to the Thirty- 
nine Articles and to the sole use of the Book 
of Common Prayer. In addition, he drew 
up, in 1584, twenty-four questions which 
every minister must answer upon the oath 
called ex-officio. So close was his watch of 
the clergy in his province, that, in the same 
year, he was able to record that there were 
786 who had subscribed as against 49 who 
had not. Under his influence the High 
Commission passed the Star Chamber De- 
cree for the licensing of printing by the 
Archbishop of Canterbury or by the Bishop 
of London. And he so exercised these 
powers that the prisons were filled with the 
victims of his despotism. His Primacy was 
stained with the blood of the martyrs. Was 
it the expression of his life purpose, or was 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD $Q 



it, as the shades of those whom he had done 
to death passed before him in that last hour, 
that to God and man he was offering defence 
in the words which fell again and again 
from his half-paralysed lips, " Pro ecclesia 
Dei"? 

It is interesting to note that Separatism 
found its ablest and most uncompromising 
leaders in East Anglia, and that the majority 
of them were Cambridge men. Henry Barrow 
was born at Shipdam, in Norfolk, of gentle 
and well-connected parentage. He was dis- 
tantly related to Lord Bacon, and perhaps 
to Aylmer, Bishop of London. A link can 
also be traced with Lord Burghley. The date 
of his birth is uncertain, but it must have 
been about the year 1550. He matriculated 
at Clare Hall in 1566, and graduated in 
1569-70. In 1576, he entered Gray's Inn, 
attended the courts, and acquired that 
familiarity with legal procedure which after- 
wards stood him in good stead. These early 
years were spent in drunken riot and 
debauch, until one day, passing a London 
church and hearing the preacher very loud 
in his discourse, the dissolute young lawyer, 
out of curiosity, passed within and was 
arrested by the truth. The change in his 
mode of life was so marked as to be much 



60 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



spoken of. Apparently he sought, by "a 
preciseness in the highest degree," to make 
reparation for a wasted youth. Henceforth, 
he gave himself to the study of Scripture and 
to the reading of good books. 

John Greenwood went to Cambridge about 
ten years later than Barrow, matriculating 
at Corpus Christi in 1577, and taking his 
Bachelor's Degree in 1 580-1. He must have 
been deeply impressed with the theological 
controversies which were just then at their 
height in the university. Cartwright, though 
expelled, was not silenced. Puritanism held 
the convictions of a band of students in- 
fluential in their numbers, learning, and 
piety. The memory of Robert Browne still 
lingered at Corpus Christi, and he himself 
had returned to teach and preach in Cam- 
bridge. Greenwood, while taking orders as 
a deacon and then as a priest, became 
chaplain to a Puritan nobleman, Lord Robert 
Rich, at Rochford, Essex, until the latter 
was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. It is 
impossible to doubt that Greenwood was 
influenced by the teachings of Browne. 
About this time, Barrow and Green- 
wood met — a meeting fraught with great 
consequences to the Church of God and 
to themselves. No doubt, Barrow was the 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 6 1 



stronger and more fiery spirit. In the 
judgment of Bancroft, "Greenwood was but 
a simple fellow, Barrow was the man." But 
they clung to their convictions with equal 
tenacity and courage, and stood side by side 
in suffering and imprisonment, until at length 
they sealed their witness with their blood, 
and death gave to them a merciful release. 

In 1586, the year of Browne's recantation, 
we find Barrow and Greenwood in fellowship 
with the London Congregation, a secret 
assembly of Separatists, which met in private 
houses on the river bank, in the woods of 
Deptford and Ratcliffe, or in the gravel pits 
of Islington. Probably, the fact that Green- 
wood had held the office of chaplain in a 
Puritan household after his ordination 
marked him out for prominence, but Barrow, 
whom he had introduced, soon came to be 
recognised as a leader through his natural 
force of character. The Congregation was 
not yet organised into a Church — an event 
which occurred in 1592 — but at this time we 
learn from depositions that it consisted of 
about one hundred persons. The Separatists 
always met by appointment early on the 
Sabbath and continued all day in prayer 
and exposition. Any brother could expound 
or offer prayer. They rejected liturgical 



62 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



forms of worship, the sacraments of Baptism 
and Communion in the Church of England, 
and secular interference with the Church 
other than God's Word allowed. At every 
meeting a collection was taken for expenses, 
the balance being sent to the relief of any 
members of the congregation who might be 
imprisoned at the time. 

As its pathetic story is unfolded, we shall 
see that perhaps no single community ever 
endured so great a measure of suffering 
in proportion to its numbers, or fell upon 
such evil days since Nero persecuted the 
Church of the Catacombs. Whitgift had not 
suppressed the Puritan " Classes," to be now 
defied by the Separatist Conventicle, which 
was within his easy reach. For a very brief, 
halcyon period, the brethren met in secret 
and found fellowship in the Gospel. Looking 
back upon it from his prison, Barrow said, 
"So sweet is the harmony of God's graces 
unto me in the congregation and the conver- 
sation of the saints at all times, as I think 
myself a sparrow on the house-top when I am 
exiled from them." But the Archbishop's 
spies were everywhere. On a Sunday in " the 
autumn of 1586" (to be exact, October 7th), 
Greenwood was reading the Scripture at the 
house of a friend in St. Paul's Churchyard 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 63 



when the Bishop of London's pursuivant burst 
in upon him and carried him off to the Clink. 
It was the low muttering of the storm, and a 
less resolute and loyal friend than Barrow 
would have sought a hiding-place. But at 
once he went up from the country to London 
to visit Greenwood. As he rode upon the 
way, he discussed the New Testament bishop 
with a Norwich man, who promptly warned 
the authorities of his approach. On the 19th, 
he reached the Clink, and discovered that 
it was one thing to get in, but quite another 
to get out. The keeper, Mr. Shepherd, had 
his instructions, and having locked him up, 
hurried to Lambeth to report so notable 
a capture. The Archbishop's pursuivants 
quickly fetched him to the Palace into the 
presence-chamber of the Archbishop. Barrow 
knew enough law to see that all the parties 
concerned had acted illegally, and stoutly 
protested at his detention without warrant. 
The first examination of the long and pain- 
ful series began. In all there were five ex- 
aminations, and repeated conferences before 
the final trial. As we shall see, Barrow did 
not bear himself wisely or temperately in 
them. We must regret his violent speech, 
his obstinate contention for trifles, while we 
are amazed at the skill with which he pleaded 



64 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



before the most powerful and subtle intellects 
of his day. But it should not be forgotten 
that he held his convictions with sufficient 
strength to endure death rather than abandon 
them, and that he and his companion, after 
months of suffering and imprisonment, broken 
in body though not in mind, overwrought in 
nerve and heart, were taken before the very 
men who, claiming to be God's ministers, had 
separated husbands from wives, parents from 
children, flung into gloomy prisons holy and 
blameless saints, and who were determined 
to crush beneath their heel the infant Church. 
If any one would condemn the bitterness 
which Barrow sometimes displayed before his 
judges, let him first hear that pitiful cry of" tor- 
tured helplessness " in the 11 Supplication n of 
1592 to the Lord Treasurer, " These enemies 
of God detain in their hands within the prisons 
about London (not to speak of other gaols 
throughout the land), about three score and 
twelve persons, men, women, young and old, 
lying in cold, in hunger, in dungeons and in 
irons." 

The story of the Examination was written 
" as near as my memory could carry M by 
Barrow himself. At the first Barrow gave a 
hint of the ability with which he could con- 
duct his case. 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 6$ 



Archbishop. Barrow, is your name Bar- 
row ? 

Barrow. Yea. 

Archbishop. It is told me that you refuse 
to receive or obey our letter. 

Barrow. I refused to receive or obey that 
letter at that time. 

Archbishop. Why so? 

Barrow. Because I was under arrest and 
imprisoned without warrant and against law ; 
and, therefore, now it is too late to bring the 
letter. 

Archbishop. Why, may not a councillor 
commit to prison by his bare command- 
ment? 

Barrow. That is not the question, — what 
a councillor may do — but whether this man 
may do it without warrant by the law of the 
land ? (Pointing to the keeper of the 
Clink.) 

Archbishop. Know you the law of the 
land? 

Barrow. Very little ; yet was I of Gray's 
Inn some years. (Then his two doctors and 
he derided mine unskilfulness.) 

(An unsuccessful attempt was then made 
to induce him to swear upon the Bible, and 
to enter into a vow to attend church. He 
quoted a passage from St. Paul.) 

6 



66 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Barrow. Even now you said, it was a thing 
indifferent ; if it be so, there is no power 
can bring me in bondage to my liberty. 

A rchbishop. Where find you that ? 

Barrow. In St. Paul, I Cor. 

(The Archbishop, Archdeacon, Dr. Cosin, 
all denied it ; he affirmed it A little Testa- 
ment in Greek and Latin was brought him, 
and a Bible. He looked for the place, but 
could not find it : Great fault was in his 
memory ; for he looked in the tenth chapter, 
neither, indeed, could he bethink him where 
to find it, they so interrupted him.) 

Archbishop. Your divinity is like your law. 

Barrow. The Word of God is not the worse 
for my ill memory. 

Archbishop. You speak not as you think, 
for you are proud. 

Barrow. I have small cause to be proud 
of my memory ; you see the default of it, but 
the apostle saith it. (Again, they all denied it.) 
You, then, have no cause to condemn my 
memory, seeing you all have utterly forgotten 
this saying. 

As soon as he was out of the house, the 
persecuted man remembered where the pas- 
sage was to be found. It is an unpleasant 
spectacle, the Archbishop, surrounded by his 
sycophants, panoplied in the might of the 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 67 



realm, deriding and bullying this poor victim 
for conscience' sake. On the other hand, 
Barrow's contempt for Whitgift came out 
again and again. He had a rough and a 
quick tongue. 

Archbishop. Well, when were you at 
church ? 

Barrow. That is nothing to you. 

■ I will send you to prison/' cried Whitgift, 
and so they took him to the Gatehouse. 

Eight days later, he was brought for his 
second examination before the High Com- 
mission at Lambeth, where he found " a 
goodly synod of bishops, deans, civilians, &c." 
Whitgift, "with a grim and angry counte- 
nance," again required Barrow to swear on 
the Bible, but was again met with an obsti- 
nate refusal. The prisoner demanded to hear 
the charge, and, as a special favour, was 
informed that he was accused of teaching that 
the Church of England was no true Church, 
having an idolatrous worship and an anti- 
christian ministry, and, further, that all cate- 
chisms were idolatrous. He still declined to 
take the oath, urging, with some reason, that 
his accusers should be sworn, and not himself. 
Canterbury then completely lost his temper 
and cried, " You shall not prattle here, away 
with him. Lock him up close : I will make 



68 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



him tell another tale ere I have done with 
him." 

The third examination was after an in- 
terval of five months. On March 24, 1587, 
Barrow was again brought before the High 
Commissioners. The Court, however, in- 
cluded not only the Archbishop with Aylmer 
and Cooper, the Bishops of London and Win- 
chester, but also the two Lord Chief Justices, 
the Master of the Rolls, and the Lord Chief 
Baron. t Whitgift yielded as to the oath. 
There was much questioning on the use of 
the Lord's Prayer and the Book of Common 
Prayer, but Barrow's central contention came 
out in his statement that these parish assem- 
blies of the Church of England, in which no 
difference was made between the faithful and 
the unbelieving, were not true Churches of 
Christ, and also that no prince might make 
any laws for the Church other than Christ 
had already left in His Word. Aylmer 
specially interrupted him "in slanders and 
evil speeches," but the Chief Justice of Eng- 
land said that Barrow had answered " very 
directly and compendiously," and again later 
that he " spake well." The civilians were evi- 
dently of calmer and juster temper than the 
ecclesiastics. Barrow was sent out in close 
custody while some of his brethren were 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 



6 9 



examined. He was recalled and directly 
challenged by Whitgift whether he would 
take the oath of the Royal Supremacy, 
which he refused to do. Further, in answer 
to the Archbishop's direct question, he boldly 
affirmed that the Church must reform at 
once " without staying for the prince," if 
he refused to do so, and also might excom- 
municate any transgressor, even the Queen 
herself, without respect of persons. In his 
examination before the same Commission, 
Greenwood, though more moderate, was 
equally resolute that "Christ is only head 
of His Church, and His laws may no man 
alter." Six weeks later Barrow and Green- 
wood were tried at Newgate before the 
Bishop of London under the first law 
against Recusants of 1581, and committed 
to the Fleet till a surety of £260 each should 
be found that they would attend church. 
The Recusancy Laws were passed when the 
fever against Papists was at its height, but 
they contained a clause which required that 
every person above sixteen years of age 
should 11 repair to some Church, Chapel, or 
usual place of Common prayer," and they 
now became a weapon against the Separatists. 

The fourth examination is the most deeply 
interesting, since it brought Barrow before 



70 BAPTIST &> CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



the great Cecil himself. There was much 
in such a meeting which might kindle 
hope in the wretched victims who had now 
been confined to the Fleet for nearly ten 
months. Of all the ghastly torture chambers 
of London this was the worst. On March 
13th, 15SS, the prisoners contrived to reach 
the ear of the Queen in a ''lamentable peti- 
tion " which related their sufferings. Some 
were in " cold and noisome " cells, others 
were bound hand and foot " with bolts and 
fetters of iron," others had been cudgelled 
to death. Nicholas Crane, sixty-six years 
of age, had died of fever in the prison ; John 
Chandler had been torn from his wife and 
eight children and had also died ; two aged 
widows had succumbed to the poisoned 
breath of the Fleet. The offence of all was 
simply that they had listened to the Word 
preached by Greenwood. Doubtless, the 
Queen commissioned Burghley to inquire, 
and, on March iSth, he sat with the Lord 
Chancellor, Whitgift, Aylmer, and others at 
Whitehall to hear the case. He was the 
boldest and wisest of the Queen's coun- 
sellors. A stranger to religious enthusiasm, 
averse from fanaticism and bigotry, he must 
have looked with cold disdain and perplexity 
upon these men who could endure so much 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 



for a mere opinion. Yet he disliked Whit- 
gift's despotic methods and desired a closer 
alliance with the Continental Reformers. He 
knew that the Papists and not these men 
were the Queen's enemies. It seems that at 
first he tried to understand Barrow's position, 
but the overwrought, almost distracted, Sepa- 
ratist, who had come fresh from the horrors 
of the Fleet, missed his way entirely. He 
urged minor issues, that saints' days were 
idolatrous, that we must not say Sunday, 
Monday, &c, since God had named them 
the first, the second day, &c. The interest 
of the Lord Treasurer had quite waned. 
Here was something he could not under- 
stand. He sat back in his chair and said 
carelessly, " I perceive thou takest delight 
to be an author of this new religion." Pre- 
sently he took another line in which he felt 
more at home. 

"You complained to us of injustice; wherein 
have you wrong? 

Barrow, My lord, in that we are thus 
imprisoned without due trial. 

Lord Treasurer. Why, you said just now 
you were condemned upon the statute. 

Barrow. Unjustly, my lord ; that statute 
was not made for us. 

Lord Treasurer. There must be straiter 
laws made for you. 



?2 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Barrow. Oh, my lord, speak more com- 
fortably, we have suffered enough." 

Burghley took up a paper of evidence, com- 
piled by Dr. Some after an interview with 
Barrow in prison, and read that the latter held 
it unlawful for a minister to live by tithes, and 
asked, in bewilderment, how, then, would the 
minister live ? " Tithes," said Barrow, " were 
done away." " What," cried Burghley jest- 
ingly, "wouldst thou have him to have all 
my goods?" It was here that the Bishop 
of London had a heavy fall. 

Burghley had said that ministers now were 
not to be called priests. 

Barrow, If they receive tithes, they are 
priests. 

London. Why, what is the word presbyter, 
I pray you ? 

Barrow, An elder. 

London. Presbyter is Latin for a priest. 

Barrow. It is no Latin word, but derived, 
and signifieth the same which the Greek 
word doth, which is an elder. 

But the excited, persecuted man had 
reached the limit of self-control. He flung 
moderation to the winds. 

Lord Chancellor. What is that man ? 
(pointing to Canterbury). 

Barrow. The Lord gave me the spirit 



barrow And greenwood 73 



of boldness, so that I answered : He is a 
monster, a miserable compound, I know not 
what to make of him ; he is neither ecclesias- 
tical nor civil, even that second beast spoken 
of in Revelation. 

He was dragged away. He had wrecked 
his chance. Afterwards, in his prison a 
better spirit prevailed. " The Lord pardon 
my unworthiness and unsanctified heart and 
mouth, which can bring no glory to the Lord 
or benefit to His Church, but rather reproach 
to the one and affliction to the other." 

Almost throughout the ensuing period, 
from March, 1588, till his sufferings ended 
in April, 1593, Barrow was kept a close 
prisoner. The bitter cry comes from the 
Fleet in 1590, "Two years and well-nigh a 
half." Again in 1592, " Four years and three 
months kept by the prelates in most miser- 
able and strict imprisonment." And yet 
again, the last cry in 1593, from Newgate, 
for the removal of "our poor worn bodies 
out of this miserable gaol." He had angered 
Whitgift too deeply to receive any grace. 
The less fiery and dangerous Greenwood 
was granted some liberty in prison, and, in 
1592, for a brief period, was set free. 

But though the body was wasted and broken 
by the long agony and awful monotony of 



74 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



imprisonment, from which Robert Browne had 
drawn back frightened, the resolute spirit of 
Barrow rose triumphant. In the story of 
persecution, many have been sustained by a 
great purpose and a clear conviction. If the 
light of heaven had not shone for him in the 
darkness of that time, he might have sunk 
into insanity. But he had still a work to 
do. By some strange means which we shall 
presently examine, he sent forth to the 
outer world tracts, pamphlets, expositions, 
and refutations, tinged with a deeper fanati- 
cism and bitterness, but profoundly interest- 
ing and illuminating to us. 

In 1589, Barrow was examined a fifth 
time before the bishops, in a fashion which 
he regarded as the greatest wrong of all. 
It was followed by months of silence, but 
on February 25th, 1589-90, the Bishop of 
London issued an order on the instruction 
of Whitgift to forty-two selected Anglican 
preachers to hold conferences twice a week 
at least " with these sectaries which do for- 
sake our Church and be for the same com- 
mitted prisoners." The list of the fifty-two 
prisoners in the Gatehouse, the Counter, 
Newgate, the Clink, and the Fleet, gives 
us a glimpse into the extent of Whitgift's 
relentless cruelty. Barrow and Greenwood 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 



are together now in the Fleet. Roger 
Rippon is in the Counter, Wood Street. 
He died in prison in 1592, and his coffin 
was borne openly from Newgate past the 
house of the justice who sentenced him, 
with the inscription, "This is ye corps of 
Roger Rippon, a servant of Christ, who is 
the last of sixteen or seventeen whom that 
great enemy of God, the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, with his High Commissioners, 
have murdered in Newgate within these 
five years for the testimony of Jesus Christ." 
There were Daniel Studley, afterwards an 
elder of the London Church, and Christopher 
Bowman, afterwards a deacon, who both, later 
on, escaped to Holland. Others are found in 
one list, and disappear in another, probably 
through death. The preachers appointed to 
confer with them were chosen chiefly from 
those who were known to have a Puritan bias. 
Some were specially hateful to the prisoners 
as being 11 renegade Reformists." There was 
no love lost between the Puritans and the 
Separatists. The charges are very familiar 
to us, the objection to forms of prayer, the 
denial of the Queen's ecclesiastical supre- 
macy and that the Church of England was a 
true Church. The interest of the confer- 
ences is centred in Barrow and Greenwood. 



76 BAPTIST hf CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Indeed, they alone were honoured with 
separate visits. The preachers had no taste 
for the unwholesome prison cells, and met 
the Separatists in the parlour. It is certain 
that the object of Whitgift was to collect 
evidence against them, but Barrow and 
Greenwood, eager to express themselves and 
to reach the listeners who crowded round 
the windows, urged their case with all bold- 
ness, not to say imprudence. Seven con- 
ferences in all were held, the first on March 
9th, 1590, and the last on April 13th. They 
were largely a confused medley of irritating 
charges and retorts which convinced no one. 
There were interesting moments, as when 
Greenwood convicted Mr. Cooper of having 
subscribed to an article which he had denied, 
or when Mr. Sperin admitted that the call to 
the ministry by the Bishop was unlawful, and 
that he held the Bishop's office to be civil 
and not ecclesiastical. Bancroft, afterwards 
Archbishop, was there, but the preacher 
whom we are most surprised to meet in 
such a bad cause is Andrewes, Prebendary 
of St. Paul's and Master of Pembroke, later 
on Bishop successively of Chichester, Ely, 
and Winchester, whose book of devotion 
ranks with the Imitatio Chris ti. That this 
saint of the universal Church, who gave five 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 77 



hours of each day to prayer, should thus 
become a party to Whitgift's policy shows 
how difficult it is for even the best of men 
to live outside their own age. It is not 
pleasant to read the colloquy between 
Barrow and himself, and to reflect that on 
the one part was the wretched prisoner with 
" worn out-body/' and on the other the 
courtly cleric on the high road to preferment. 

Andrewes. For close imprisonment you 
are most happy. The solitary and contem- 
plative life I hold the most blessed life. It is 
the life I would choose. 

Barrow. But could you be content also, 
Mr. Andrewes, to be kept from exercise so 
long together? 

Andrewes. I say not that I would want 
air. But who be those saints you spake of ; 
where are they ? 

Barrow. They are even those poor Chris- 
tians whom you so blaspheme and persecute, 
and now most unjustly hold in your prisons. 

Andrewes. But where is their congregation? 

Barrow. Though I knew, I purpose not to 
tell you. 

The conferences served no good purpose, 
and Andrewes, finding them little to his taste, 
withdrew from them entirely. 



78 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



II— Martyrdom. 

We now turn to the amazing literary 
work of Barrow and Greenwood during their 
imprisonment — amazing not only in 'its 
volume, but still more in the extent of 
its circulation. Their treatises were not 
penned in some cloistered retreat of learning, 
in the midst of books and friends, to be 
followed by the reward of place and power. 
Often in filthy and gloomy cells, through 
days of silent brooding broken only by 
the step of the gaoler, with such writing 
material as could be secretly introduced, on 
scraps of paper which were themselves a 
sentence of death to the writer if discovered 
— this was the story of the Separatist prison 
literature. Doubtless, means were found to 
bribe their keepers. When the cells and 
even the persons of the writers were searched 
and rifled, by some means incriminating 
papers were hidden away. Agents were 
found in Robert Stokes and Robert Boyle, 
who flitted between London and Holland, 
obtaining the manuscript, getting it printed 
at Dort, and bringing copies over the water. 
There were other agents, Greenwood's wife, 
Cycely a maidservant, Studley the receiver, 
Forester the copyist. The smuggling of 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 79 



these contraband goods went on apace. 
Sometimes, especially in the case of the 
later and more important books, the whole 
or part of the edition was seized, only a copy 
or two remaining in the hands of a friend. 

In 1586, Barrow was examined for the 
first time, and, as we have seen, he set 
down the story of this and later trials to 
the best of his memory. Probably, the first 
Separatist Manifesto, published in 1588, A 
Brief Summary of the Causes of our Separa- 
tion, was the joint work of Barrow and 
Greenwood. In 1589, Barrow issued, in 
conjunction with Greenwood, a defence, en- 
titled, A True Description of the Visible 
Congregation of the Saints ; in 1590, A 
collection of Scandalous Articles given out 
by the Bishops with the answer of the 
Prisoners thereunto. Also the summary oj 
certain conferences in the Fleet; later, in 
1 590, The Platforme, in which he urged that 
it was the Prince's duty to root out false 
ministries in the land ; early in 1591, A Brief 
Discovery of the false Church, a volume of 
39 1 pages, of which 3,000 copies were printed. 
The reply by Job Throckmorton to Dr. 
Some's Godly Treatise, which was entitled, 
Master Some laid open in his colours, has 
been wrongly attributed to Greenwood ; but 



80 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



in 1590, he issued a reply to Mr. Gifford's 
defence of read prayers, and, jointly with 
Barrow, a refutation of Mr. Gifford's com- 
parison between the Donatists and Separatists. 
These, together with Barrow's Letter to an 
Honourable Lady and Countess of his Kindred, 
and also petitions to the House of Commons 
and to Lord Burghley, were their principal 
appeals to that outer world from which they 
were debarred. Some of these manuscripts 
were not printed for twenty years, but were 
circulated privately from hand to hand. 

The days were becoming darker for Puri- 
tans and Separatists. Whitgift and Aylmer 
were exasperated by the biting satire and 
fiery invective of Martin Mar-Prelate. In 
spite of the intervention of James of Scot- 
land and Sir Francis Knollys, Cartwright, the 
most distinguished of the Puritans, lay in the 
Fleet, while Udall was sentenced to death 
and actually died in prison at the end of 
1592. The leniency which had permitted 
Greenwood to be out on bail, and even 
Barrow to leave his prison for a few hours, 
gave place to a fresh raid of persecution. 
The London congregation was now, in 1592, 
formed into a regular Congregational Church, 
afterwards known as the Ancient Church, 
with Francis Johnson as its pastor, Both he 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 8 1 



and Greenwood were arrested on December 
5th, at the house of Edward Boyes, on Lud- 
gate Hill. One after another the Separatists 
were seized and imprisoned. Barrow pleaded 
passionately for a public conference, but on 
March n, 1593, he and Greenwood were 
charged before Judges Popham and Ander- 
son, under the statute of Elizabeth against 
the issue of seditious books. The author- 
ship was easily established, and passages 
were cited to prove that the accused held 
both her Majesty and the Government to be 
anti-Christian. The Lord Treasurer was care- 
fully watching the proceedings and reporting 
to Elizabeth. Execution was delayed, but, 
on March 23rd, Barrow and four others were 
condemned to death as felons. Early on the 
24th, Barrow and Greenwood were brought 
out of the limbo and their irons struck off, but 
as they were about to be tied to the cart, the 
Queen's messenger brought a reprieve. Doc- 
tors and deans came to exhort them, but they 
were sick of controversy. " Our time was too 
short in the world." On March 31st, they 
were, very early and secretly, carried to the 
place of execution, but while they waited for 
death, with the rope round their necks, again 
there was a reprieve, and they were carried 
back to Newgate amid the joyful cries of the 
7 



82 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



populace. Barrow made one last appeal for 
help, to a noble lady. Meanwhile, the bishops 
were seeking to pass a more stringent mea- 
sure through the Lower House against 
Brownists and Barrowists. It was received 
with signs of impatient dislike, and almost 
thrown out, but on April 5th, was allowed to 
pass in a " minced " condition. Burghley was 
annoyed with Whitgift, and taxed him 
soundly "against shedding the blood of men 
who held the faith (z>., non-Romanist) pro- 
fessed ' in England." To spite the nether 
House, the bishops hastened the execution, 
and, with the utmost secrecy, on the morning 
of April 6, 1593, two aged widows carrying 
their winding sheets, Barrow and Greenwood 
were taken to Tyburn, and there hanged. 
Two stories of slightly doubtful authority are 
related by Governor Bradford, which at least 
reflect the uneasy consciences of some who 
were concerned in this judicial murder. The 
Queen demanded of the learned Dr. Reynolds 
what he thought of Barrow and Greenwood. 
Being compelled to speak, he replied that " if 
they had lived, they would have been two as 
worthy instruments for the Church of God 
as have been raised up in this age." Her 
Majesty sighed and said no more. Again, 
riding in the Park, she asked the Earl of 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 83 



Cumberland what end they made. " A very 
godly end/' he replied, " and prayed for your 
Majesty and the State." Excepting Penry, 
it was the last execution of Separatists, as 
Separatists, on English soil. 

It remains to inquire how far the Congre- 
gationalism of Barrow answered to that of 
Robert Browne. Essentially there was much 
in common. Both held the immediate duty 
of separation from a corrupt Church ; that 
these parish assemblies, as they contemptu- 
ously styled them, were no true Church ; that 
without discipline " this holy power of Christ, 
to censure and redress faults and offenders, 
there can be no Church, no ministry, no com- 
munion " ; that the Scriptures, interpreted by 
the Spirit given to each believer, were the 
sole and complete guide in all faith and prac- 
tice ; that both as to the Old and New Testa- 
ments no man might alter or neglect the 
least iota thereof ; and that the particular 
Church was a fellowship of faithful and holy 
people, gathered in the name of Christ Jesus, 
governed by His officers and laws. Indeed, 
Barrow's love for the Church flashes out in 
many a noble passage, undimmed by the 
sad experiences at Newgate and Middleberg. 
In the Confession of 1589, he wrote : — 

" Most joyful, excellent, and glorious things 



84 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



are everywhere in the Scriptures spoken of 
this Church. It is called the city, house, 
temple, and mountain of the eternal God, 
the chosen generation, the holy nation, the 
peculiar people, the vineyard, the garden en- 
closed, the spring shut up, the sealed foun- 
tain, the orchard of pomegranates with sweet 
fruits, the heritage, the Kingdom of Christ, 
yea, His sister, His love, His spouse, His 
queen, and His body, the joy of the whole 
earth. To this society is the covenant and 
all the promises made of peace, of love, 
and of salvation and the presence of God, 
of His graces, of His power, and of His 
protection." 

But the rigid logic and legal training of 
Barrow led him into a form of Congrega- 
tionalism which was oligarchical and aristo- 
cratic. He pursued his theory w r ith the 
relentless persistence of the most unbending 
High Churchman. Barrow was most dis- 
tinctly not a Presbyterian. The officers of 
the Church are the same as in Browne's Book 
which Sheweth. With him, the ministry or 
eldership consists of the pastor to exhort, the 
teacher to expound (a recognition of the fact 
that there are teachers who cannot arouse 
or apply), and the ruling elder to conduct and 
oversee. Beyond these, are the relievers, or 



BARROW AND GREENWOOD 85 



deacons, who gather and bestow, and the 
widows of not less than sixty years of age 
to pray and visit. But here the system be- 
comes more elaborate. There is no equality 
in the Church. Honour and obedience are 
due to its officers, who, however, hold all they 
have at the disposal of the Church. Yet it is 
the business of the whole Church to exercise 
discipline, and each member has power to 
examine the administration of the Sacraments 
and the doctrine taught. " I never thought that 
the practice of Christ's government belonged 
only to those officers." The Church may not 
receive any form of government but this. 
Every true minister must not only be quali- 
fied with gifts, but lawfully called thereto by 
the Church and ordained with fasting and 
prayer. Inexorably, he argues that gifts 
and fruits of service do not make a minister 
apart from the election of the Church. The 
office of the deacon is to distribute and not 
to govern, and any other view is " gross error 
and ignorance/' Only the pastor may ad- 
minister the Sacraments, and the London 
Church went for months without the Com- 
munion, while its pastor was in the Fleet. 
The ministry is to be maintained in food and 
raiment by the gifts of believers only. At 
least, essential elements of Congregationalism 



86 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



are here, a Church government based on 
the Word of God, and a particular Church 
governed by the people and for the people, 
exercising its own discipline. It is altogether 
extreme and misleading to say with Dr. 
Grosart, in the Dictionary of National 
Biography, that " while separate ' meeting- 
houses ' of ' believers 1 grew out of Barrow's 
teachings and example, he himself had no 
idea corresponding with present-day Congre- 
gationalism." 

For a time, Whitgift's espionage and cruelty 
and the growing severity of the laws were 
effective. Sir Walter Raleigh was wildly 
inaccurate when, in 1593, he spoke of the 
Separatists as numbering 30,000. The esti- 
mate of Lord Bacon was nearer the fact, 
though he went to the other extreme, when 
he described them as nearly extinct. Their 
ablest leaders were hung. Their pastors 
and teachers and most devoted members 
were in prison, but as the torch fell from 
the hands of Barrow and Greenwood, it was 
passed on to faithful men. Being dead, the 
martyrs yet spake by the memory of their 
sufferings and constancy, and through the 
writings which enshrined their faith. A new 
scene, however, was about to open in the 
drama of Separatism. 



IV 



JOHN PENRY AND THE MARTIN 
MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY 

WE must not suppose that the great 
mass of the people in that laughter- 
loving Elizabethan age were reached by the 
pamphlets and the solemn reasonings of 
the Separatist prisoners. To Barrow and 
Greenwood their religious convictions were 
precious as their own life-blood, and even 
more so. It was a matter of life and death 
to them whether there was a New Testament 
eldership and discipline in the Church and 
whether prayers were read or extempore. 
These matters had a civil bearing also, and, 
just because they seemed to threaten the 
peace of the realm, bishops exercised tre- 
mendous powers in the High Commission 
against schismatics, and magistrates became 

expert theologians on the bench. But even 
87 



88 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



the world of the Puritan day, engaged in 
buying and selling, love and war, took its 
course untouched by a new pamphlet or a 
ponderous tome. It was enough for the 
ordinary man to hate the bishops and to 
pity the prisoners, but probably he knew and 
cared little what Separatism meant. The 
Martin Marprelate tracts did this at least — 
they widened the interest. The controversy 
became more national. By striking a blow at 
the reverence and awe which had surrounded 
a bishop's state, they effected a subtle and 
dangerous change in public sentiment. It was, 
to borrow a simile, as if a clown had suddenly 
leaped into the arena, flinging jests and mud 
at the stateliest and the proudest, while the 
galleries rang with laughter. The taste for 
personalities is widespread. The railings, the 
unsparing charges, the spicy anecdotes, the 
raked-up scandals, the audacity and impu- 
dence of Martin delighted the Court, the 
university, and the cottage. Scholars hid 
the tracts under their gowns ; in Church, men 
peeped over the shoulder of the fortunate 
possessor of the Epistle or the Epitome; 
nobles carried them into the palace. The 
stabs were in the dark. For the first time 
the combatants were on fairly equal terms. 
The bishops had their dark and unscrupulous 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MAR PR EL A TE 89 



methods. The pamphleteer worked in secret 
also. It was no argument against Episcopacy 
to point out that the Bishop of St. David's 
had two wives (simultaneously), but then it 
was no proper answer to a Separatist to cast 
him into " Little Ease." The authorship has 
never been discovered. There were several 
upon whom suspicion fastened — Barrow, 
Penry, Udall, Throckmorton — but the one 
who suffered the penalty of death for his 
connection with Martin was John Penry. 

So far, as we have seen, the leaders had 
come from East Anglia, but the new champion 
descended into the fray from his native hills 
of Wales. In many ways he invests the 
story with a halo of romance. His meteoric 
career is marked by dauntless courage, fiery 
eloquence, and passionate devotion. He 
flashes through the record with swift and 
mysterious movements, crowds his work into 
a few busy years, and then, with the same 
swiftness, passes from the scene. No wickeder 
or more unmerited treatment was meted out 
to any one; yet he did not shrink. "If my 
blood were an Ocean Sea, and every drop 
thereof were a life unto me, I would give 
them all, by the help of the Lord, for the 
maintenance of the same my confession." 

John Penry was born at Cefn Brith, in 



90 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Brecknockshire, in 1559, the year of Eliza- 
beth's first Parliament and of the Act of 
Uniformity. Nothing is known of his early 
years. Perhaps some signs of brilliance 
and power led his parents to send him to 
Cambridge, and on December 3, 1580, he 
matriculated as a pensioner of Peterhouse, 
proceeding to B.A. in 1583. For some 
unexplained reason he passed on to Oxford, 
became a Commoner of St. Alban's Hall, and 
took l}is M.A. there in 1586. He married 
Eleanor, daughter of Henry Godley, of North- 
ampton, by whom he had four daughters, the 
youngest of whom was only four years old 
when he suffered martyrdom. 

There is reason to believe that he went to 
the university as a Romanist, and that at 
first he used to steal out to Mass at mid- 
night. But the influence of the Puritans led 
to a change in his convictions. He became 
the friend of Udall, and his earliest published 
writings reflected the common sentiments and 
opinions of the milder Puritans of that day. 
Wales has always been distinguished for its 
open-air preachers, and this young apostle 
from the university, who had so recently 
found Christ himself, went throughout the 
hills and valleys of his native land, preaching 
the Word. " I never bare office," he said in 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MARPRELATE 9 1 



his final examination, " in any Church." He 
was simply a lay preacher. The religious 
condition of the people at that time must 
have been mournful in the extreme. The 
clergy were ignorant, often drunken and 
licentious, greedy of gain, many of them non- 
resident. There was little or no preaching in 
the churches. Penry declared that there 
were thousands in Wales who had never 
heard the name of Christ, and that the people 
were given up to idolatry, swearing, adultery, 
thieving, and superstitious beliefs in fairies. 
The soul of the young enthusiast was stirred 
within him, and in March, 1587, he published 
The Aequtty, an address to the Queen and 
to the Parliament which sat from February 
15th to March 23rd in that year, "that some 
order might be taken for the preaching of the 
Gospel among those people." 

It is very important, in estimating the 
action of Whitgift, to note the moderation 
and gentleness of this first treatise. Penry 
was in no sort of opposition to Episcopacy 
and made no attack upon it. He dedicated 
the work to "my fathers and brethren of the 
Church of England." He was a loyal subject 
of Elizabeth, unto whom " I owe," he wrote, 
u all obedience and service in the Lord Jesus." 
He was not even a Separatist or a Voluntary, 



92 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



but urged that Parliament should decree a 
maintenance for every godly, learned minister 
for the term of his life, and also one-tenth of 
each "impropriate living " to the maintenance 
of a teaching ministry. It was simply that 
he had a passion for souls and an earnest 
longing that the Gospel of Christ might, to 
use his own words, " in a saving measure be 
made known and published among the in- 
habitants of Wales, my dear and native 
countrymen." " Why cannot we have 
preacKing in our own tongue ? " he cried. 
Let there be an end of non-resident clergy. 
Let the Welsh preachers in England be sent 
home. No reading clergyman was a true 
minister. Some who never preached had 
three livings. " They whose hearts the Lord 
hath touched would thresh to get their living 
rather than the people should want preaching. 
Our gentlemen and people . . . would con- 
tribute. Salvation were not bought too dear 
with the very flesh of our arms." 

By the publication of The Aequity Penry 
had violated the Star Chamber Decree of 
June 23, 1586, which required the censorship 
of the Archbishop of Canterbury or the 
Bishop of London. No press was allowed 
outside the Metropolis other than one at 
each university, and a few hand-presses which 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MARPRELA TM 93 



were known and watched. The battle for 
the liberty of unlicensed printing, which 
should later enlist Milton as a protagonist, 
was beginning in real earnest. By Whitgift's 
order this lay preacher was brought before 
the High Commission, and roughly ordered 
to recant. The Bishop of Winchester de- 
clared that to say that no bare reader was a 
minister was heresy. " I thank God," replied 
Penry, " that I ever knew such a heresy, as I 
will by the grace of God sooner leave my life 
than leave it." Whitgift declared he would 
make him recant. He was committed to 
prison for twelve days but kept there a 
month, and then released without further 
examination. It was a blunder as well as 
a crime to make an enemy of such a man, 
and it is an illustration of the striking charge 
of Lord Macaulay, that the Church of Eng- 
land, unlike that of Rome, has no place for 
an Ignatius Loyola, a Bunyan, or a Wesley. 

It was natural that Penry, who had 
hitherto moved in Puritan circles, should 
attract the attention of some leading mem- 
bers of that party. At this stage we must 
introduce into the story three men who 
played a great part in the Marprelate con- 
troversy. Udall was a Puritan divine who 
held the living of Kingston-on-Thames. In 



94 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PlONEEKS 



April, 1588, he issued from the secret press 
an anonymous tract commonly known as 
DiotrepheSy purporting to be a conference 
on the state of the Church of England, and 
in 1589 the Demonstration of Discipline^ 
advocating the divine authority of Presby- 
terian Church government. Strongly sus- 
pected of being Martin, he was imprisoned 
and sentenced to death. The sentence was 
commuted to imprisonment, and he died in 
the Marshalsea in 1 592. James of Scotland 
called him " the greatest scholar in Europe." 
Job Throckmorton was a Puritan gentleman 
living at Haseley, in Warwickshire, who sat 
in Parliament from 1572 to 1583, and again 
in 1586-7. An Oxford graduate, he was 
learned and eloquent, and also of a very 
biting wit. Waldegrave was a Puritan 
printer in the Strand, whose press had been 
seized and destroyed for printing the Dio- 
trephes. These three now combined with 
Penry, probably after conference at Kings- 
ton, to issue anti-clerical literature. Before 
Michaelmas, 1588, Penry had purchased a 
press, Throckmorton supplying the money, 
and had set it up secretly in the house of 
Mrs. Crane, a widow at East Molesey. 

The opportunity for the effective use of 
the secret press was supplied by Dr. Bridges, 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MARPRELATB 95 



the Dean of Salisbury. In 1587 he had issued 
A Defence of the Government of the Church of 
England, in a ponderous tome of 1,409 pages. 
A more ridiculous book the world never saw. 
Martin quoted from it one sentence of one 
hundred and fifty words, of which no man 
could make any sense, with the comment, 
" Dean take breath and then to it again." 
To deal with it " according to order " he 
saw would be tedious and absurd. But in 
November, 1588, there suddenly appeared, 
whence no one knew, the first of the Mar- 
prelate tracts with the singular title : " Oh 
read ouer D. Iohn Bridges, for it is a worthy 
worke : Or an epitome of the fyrste Booke of 
that right worshipfull volume, written against 
the Puritanes, in the defence of the noble 
cleargie, by as worshipfull a prieste, Iohn 
Bridges, Presbyter, Priest or elder, doctor of 
Diuillitie, and Deane of Sarum. . . . The 
Epitome is not yet published, but it shall be 
when the Bishops are at conuenient leysure 
to view the same. In the meane time, let 
them be content with this learned Epistle. 
Printed oversea, in Europe, within two fur- 
longs of a Bounsing Priest, at the cost and 
charges of M. Marprelate, gentleman. 5 ' It 
had little to do with Dr. Bridges except to 
make fun of him, but the whole land resounded 



g6 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



with its ridicule of the bishops and its budget 
of scandalous stories. Martin talks to the 
prelates with easy impudence. It is always 
" brethren bishops," "your brother Martin/' 
a my learned brethren." He charges Whit- 
gift with having been silenced by Cartwright 
But it is upon Aylmer, Bishop of London, 
that he concentrates the attack. He accuses 
him of making his porter, a " dumb minister," 
of stealing some cloth, of defrauding his 
creditors, and of being a profane swearer. 
He quotes a passage from a book which 
Aylmer had unfortunately published when 
he was a Marian exile, " Come down, you 
bishops, from your thousands, and content 
you with your hundreds, let your diet be 
priestlike and not princelike." He adds with 
a pungent humour, " But I pray you, B. Iohn, 
dissolve this one question to your brother 
Martin : if this prophesy of yours come to 
pass in your days, who shall be B. of 
London ? " He lays down conditions of 
peace with the promise upon performance 
" never to make known any more of your 
knavery unto the world." He quotes from 
a sermon of the Bishop of Gloucester, who, 
preaching at Worcester, " came at length to 
the very pith of the whole sermon, contained 
in the distinction of the name of Iohn, which 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MARPRELATE 97 

he then shewing all his learning at once, full 
learnedly handled after this manner. "Iohn, 
Iohn, the grace of God, the grace of God, 
the grace of God ; gracious Iohn, not grace- 
less Iohn, but gracious Iohn. Iohn, holy 
Iohn, holy Iohn, not Iohn full of holes, but 
holy Iohn." Such was the Epistle. Mean- 
while, Waldegrave had moved the secret press 
to Sir Richard Knightley's at Fawsley, in 
Northamptonshire, and early in December 
the promised Epitome appeared. In Feb- 
ruary, 1589, the pilgrim press was at the 
house of John Hales at Coventry, and a third 
tract appeared, a broadside, entitled, Certain 
Minerall and Metaphysical School Points, 
which has been questioned as a genuine 
Martin. It was felt that Martin was making 
too deep an impression to be allowed to go 
unanswered, and Thomas Cooper, Bishop of 
Winchester, under the signature of 14 T. C./ 1 
had issued in January, 1 589, An Admonition to 
the People of England. On March 23rd, the 
fourth Martin tract appeared with a title 
borrowed from a London street cry, Ha y 1 
any work for Cooper? It is outside the scope 
of this chapter to deal at any length with the 
contents of these pamphlets. But we may 
notice that, in the Epitome ) Martin sees plainly 
enough that the real difference between 
8 



98 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Whitgift and the Puritans is "whether the 
external government of the Church of Eng- 
land be a thing so prescribed by the Lord in 
the New Testament as it is not lawful for 
any man to alter the same." He is also 
aware that his jests and gibes, indeed his 
whole method of attack, are disliked by 
Cartwright and many of the Puritan clergy. 
"The Puritans are angry with me, I mean 
the Puritan preachers. And why ? Because 
I am, too open. Because I jest." And again, 
" I jested because I dealt against a worship- 
ful jester, D. Bridges, whose writings and 
sermons tend to no other end than to make 
men laugh. . « . I am plain. I must needs 
call a spade a spade." Again in the Ha y % 
any Work? he seeks to justify himself : 14 1 am 
called Martin Marprelat," he pleads, " There 
be many that greatly dislike of my doings. 
I may have my wants, I know. For I am a 
man. But my course I knowe to be ordinary 
and lawfulL I sawe the cause of Christ's 
government, and of the Bishops' anti-Chris- 
tian dealing, to be hidden. The most part 
of men could not be gotten to read anything, 
written in the defence of the one and against 
the other. I bethought mee therefore of a 
way whereby men might be drawne to do 
both, perceiving the humours of men in these 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MA RPR EL A TE 99 

times ... to be given to mirth. I tooke that 
course. I might lawfully do it. I (aye) for 
jesting is lawful by circumstances even in the 
greatest matters. ... I never profaned the 
Word in any jeste. Other mirth I used as 
a covert wherein I would bring the truth 
to light. The Lord being the author both 
of mirth and gravitie, is it not lawfull in 
itselfe for the truth to use either of these 
ways when the circumstances do make it 
lawfull ? " 

The hunt for Martin was becoming very 
hot. All through 1589, by Whitgift's orders, 
spies were everywhere, and witnesses were 
constantly examined. Waldegrave was 
alarmed and retired to Rochelle. In June, 
Penry went to stay with Throckmorton at 
Haseley, and, in July, at Wolston Priory, 
the home of another sympathiser, Robert 
Wigston. On July 22nd Theses Martinienses 
appeared, and on July 29th The Just Censure 
and Reproofe of Martin Junior. Then the 
press was carried to Newton Lanes, Man- 
chester, and More Work for Cooper printed. 
In August, for the first time, the Government 
scored against Martin. The press was seized, 
and the copies confiscated, but somehow an 
inferior press was set up at Wolston, More 
Work printed again, and finally, in September, 



100 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



the last of the Martin Marprelate series, The 
Protestation. 

It was a romantic story, the printing, the 
sale, the secrecy of it all, seven genuine 
Martins between November, 1588, and Sep- 
tember, 1589. Penry had moved about from 
place to place, planning, superintending, 
carrying his life in his hands, sometimes 
disguised as a gallant with sword and cloak. 
He had published under his own name, from 
the secret press, An Exhortation, which was 
a further plea for preaching in Wales; A 
supplication to Parliament, and also a reply 
to Dr. Some. In 1589 he published The 
App elation, an appeal to the High Court of 
Parliament against Whitgift and the High 
Commission, in which he recounted the 
treatment he had received. "What can the 
murdering Inquisition of Spain do more?" 
he asked. In 1 590 he was denounced as 
Martin by name in An Almond for a 
Parratt ; his house at Northampton was 
searched and ransacked ; an order was made 
for his arrest. He was strongly suspected of 
being Martin Marprelate, but, with Throck- 
morton's help, he fled to Scotland, where he 
was warmly welcomed, and preached in many 
of the Churches. His rapid pen was soon at 
work again and he published a Treatise, 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MA RPR B LA TE 101 



maintaining the loyalty to Her Majesty and 
the State of himself and his party, and also 
An Humble Motion to the Privy Council, 
suggesting how easily they might provide a 
learned ministry. It will be observed that he 
was still a Puritan, and his reception in Scot- 
land was very different from that which had 
been accorded to Robert Browne. Whitgift 
issued an order for his arrest, which Elizabeth 
followed up by a letter to James of Scotland, 
but he remained in safety across the border. 

The identity of Martin Marprelate cannot 
be determined with absolute certainty, but it 
is in the highest degree probable that the 
tracts were the work of Penry and Throck- 
morton. It is certain that Penry super- 
intended the printing and publication. Dr. 
Dexter's elaborate argument that Barrow was 
the author is untenable. The Marprelate 
tracts were strongly Puritan, and Martin 
utterly repudiates more than one charac- 
teristic doctrine of Barrow. The evidence of 
Sharpe, the bookbinder, and the statements 
of Sutcliffe leave little doubt that Penry and 
Throckmorton collaborated, perhaps using 
some notes left by the Puritan, Field. Sharpe 
saw the manuscript of the Minerall and 
Metaphysical School Points in Penry 's hands. 
Sutcliffe described Throckmorton as a " brave 



102 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



cutter in kitchen rhetoric." Moreover, the style 
of Throckmorton's Master Some laid open in 
his colours, much resembles the raillery and 
insulting personalities of Martin. We may 
speculate that Throckmorton, with his bitter 
pen, chiefly wrote the Epistle, but that Penry, 
feeling keenly the attitude of the Puritan 
leaders, introduced a far larger proportion of 
argument into Ha y } any work for Cooper? 
The secret, however, was well kept. 

In September, 1592, it was again laid on 
Penry's heart to preach the gospel in Wales. 
With remarkable courage and not a little 
indiscretion, he went up to London, and for 
the first time manifested Separatist sym- 
pathies. Apparently, he joined the London 
Church, which, as we have seen, had Francis 
Johnson and Greenwood among its officers. 
Perhaps it was in the house of Roger Rippon, 
in Southwark, that he heard Greenwood 
preach during the latter's brief respite from 
prison. He may have met with Barrow. 
Later, he wrote of Barrow and Greenwood as 
" my dear brethren." We judge from his 
final examination that he accepted the call of 
the Church to preach, and he certainly exer- 
cised his gifts at the Borough, Smithfield, 
Islington, and Stepney. One day, the vicar 
of Stepney recognised him in the street. He 



JOHN PENRY AND MARTIN MA R PRE LA T E 103 



was arrested and flung into the Poultry 
prison. At the Court of Queen's Bench, 
May 21, 1593, he was tried on a charge of 
treason on the strength of some "confused, 
unfinished, and unpublished M notes taken 
from his desk at his arrest. There was not 
sufficient evidence to connect him with Mar- 
prelate. The record of his examination is 
preserved, and still glows with the splendour 
of his devotion to the preaching of the Gospel. 
He would have heard of the martyrdom of 
Barrow and Greenwood, and he had little hope 
of escape. Almost his last act was to address 
a protest to Burghley, in which he re-asserted 
his loyalty to Elizabeth. It was a touching 
appeal. " I am a poor young man," he said, 
" born and bred in the mountains of Wales. I 
am the first, since the last springing up of the 
Gospel in this latter age, that laboured to 
have the blessed seed thereof sown in these 
barren mountains." He wrote also a letter to 
his wife and little girls, and finally a message 
to the London Church. " I am ready," he 
wrote to his wife ; 14 pray for me. The Lord 
comfort thee, good Helen, and strengthen 
thee. My God will provide. My love be 
with thee now and ever in Jesus Christ." To 
the Church he wrote, advising them to pre- 
pare for exile abroad, to cleave together, and, 



104 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



wherever they went, to take with them his 
desolate widow and friendless orphans. On 
May 29th at noon, he was told that he 
must die at four o'clock that day, and at five 
he was taken to St. Thomas-a- Watering and 
hung. It was all secret and hurried. A few 
friends hastily gathered round, but the young 
preacher was not allowed to speak to them. 
Far from his own loved and native mountains 
of Wales, he laid down his life upon a false 
charge of treason. The beginning of his 
offence was simply an unquenchable yearning 
for the souls of his fellow-countrymen. Had 
he been content to see the multitude scattered 
as sheep without a shepherd, or perishing with 
none to help or teach, his brilliant gifts might 
have won for him preferment and dignity. 
His death was a triumph for his enemies, 
short-lived and ominous, for already the 
clouds were gathering black and threatening 
above them. 



V 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINS- 
WORTH—THE ANCIENT CHURCH 
IN EXILE 

IT has already been pointed out that, after 
the execution of Barrow and Greenwood, 
a new chapter opened in the story of Sepa- 
ratism. The scene was changed to Amster- 
dam. The great majority of the "Ancient 
Church" in London went out into exile. 
Newgate, the Clink, and the Fleet discharged 
their wretched victims, who now found an 
asylum in the only country in Europe where, 
after its heroic struggle with Spain, liberty of 
conscience prevailed. This new departure 
was the issue of the new legislation of Eliza- 
beth, which was directed against Brownists 
and Barrowists, and which for the first time 
expressly distinguished between Romanists 
and Separatists. The former were still to be 

105 



I06 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



kept at home for fine, imprisonment, and 
execution ; the latter were of less conse- 
quence, " not many mighty, not many noble," 
and could be well spared from the body 
politic. 

The frequent examinations of the prisoners 
and conferences with them showed plainly 
that many in high places viewed with uneasi- 
ness the severities meted out to those who, 
like themselves, held the Protestant faith. 
There seemed little chance of breaking their 
resolution. It was easier to get rid of them. 
The Conventicle Act of 1593 provided that 
persons above the age of sixteen who refused 
to repair to church as by law established, or 
attended a conventicle, should be imprisoned, 
and, failing to conform in three months, 
should be banished from the realm. If they 
returned they should be hung. The new 
enactment opened a deeply interesting era 
in Free Church history. Cruel and infamous 
as it was, it led, in the Providence of God, to 
the founding of a free empire in the distant 
West, and it explains why the scene shifted 
for a time to Amsterdam and Leyden, to New 
England and Massachusetts. 

Acting upon the advice of Penry just 
before his death, most of the members of the 
London Church made their way to Amster- 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINS WORTH IOJ 



dam towards the close of 1593. The two 
sections were henceforth separated by the 
sea, but the Church was still regarded as one. 
The membership in Amsterdam elected 
Ainsworth to take the place of the martyr 
Greenwood as teacher, but was without 
pastoral care until Johnson arrived four years 
later. Until he came, there was no celebra- 
tion of baptism or the Lord's Supper, since 
no one was deemed competent to administer 
either sacrament. Even after its pastor, 
teacher, elders, and deacons finally settled 
in Amsterdam, the membership in London 
made no attempt at a separate organisation, 
and when last we hear of it in 1624, it was 
totally without resident officers. Such facts 
throw a strong light upon the then current 
theory of Church government. 

It was an escape from prison and the reign 
of terror, but it was a cruel necessity which 
thus drove the exiles forth. They found 
themselves in a strange land among people 
speaking a strange tongue. They were poor, 
and, apart from a legacy of Barrow and some 
contributions from London, they would have 
starved but for the charity of some Dutch 
magistrates and Puritan English merchants 
in Barbary. They learnt to card wool and 
to spin. They became workers in different 



108 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



trades, but it must have been a hard life, 
especially for some of them, to live on six- 
pence a week, or, like the gentle and scholarly 
Ainsworth, to subsist on " boiled roots." 

Shortly after the Church re-assembled at 
Amsterdam, it received a notable accession 
in Henry Ainsworth. In spite of the great 
part he played, it is in keeping with his 
modest and retiring character that we know 
so little of his career. He was by far the 
most learned of the Separatists, having 
scarcely his equal in Europe in knowledge of 
Hebrew and Greek. Such erudition was the 
„ more remarkable since, on the testimony of 
Roger Williams, "he scarce set foot within 
a college walls." He was born about 1 570 at 
Swanton, in Norfolk. After he became a 
Separatist and joined the exiled Church in 
Amsterdam, about 1595, he became its 
teacher, and was noted for his profound and 
moving expositions of the Word of God. 
He was mighty in the Scriptures, and could 
quote the exact words of Holy Writ, without 
turning to the page, to illustrate and enforce 
his doctrine. To the outer world he could 
speak in the tongue of the learned, and in 
his graceful Latin translation, the "Confes- 
sion " of the Church reached the ear of 
scholars. Twenty-three volumes, which in- 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND A INS WORTH 109 



eluded a version of the Psalms, an annotation 
of the Pentateuch, and a metrical rendering 
of the Song of Solomon, witnessed to his 
industry. Indeed, his gift of sacred song was 
a scandal to some who refused to sing with 
him in the worship of the Church : — 

"Unto Jehovah sing will I, 
For He exalteth gloriously, 
The horse and him that rode thereon 
Into the sea thrown down hath He. 
Jah is my strength and melody, 
And hath been my salvation/' 

We can imagine the pale and delicate student 
poring over his books, speaking little of his 
privations, and making the best of his 
" boiled roots." It is cheering to learn that 
he married and was henceforth better cared 
for. He was a lover of peace, but it was his 
unutterable misfortune to be involved in 
ceaseless broils. His conscience carried him 
out upon stormy seas. At last, worn out by 
his labours and troubles, after a long and 
painful illness, at the age of fifty-two his 
gentle spirit found rest. 

The Brownists were everywhere spoken 
against. There are signs that the Dutch 
and French pastors of Amsterdam looked 
with dislike and distrust upon this little knot 



110 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



of sectaries who were as bitterly opposed to 
the Puritans as to the Conformists of Eng- 
land. That these exiles, most of them arti- 
sans, poor and unlettered, should claim to 
have reached the truth and alone to be right, 
was an audacity amounting almost to an im- 
pertinence. Conscious that they were mis- 
understood, the Church published, in 1596, 
A True Confession of the Faith of the 
Brownists, which is a document of profound 
interest and value. It is prefaced by a 
description of the wrongs they had suffered 
at the hands of the bishops. Its tone is one 
of bitterness, and there is no restraint on 
their indignation as they recall the " bar- 
barous cruelty " of their oppressors. It 
always rankles in their breasts that their 
opponents would not answer them by " free 
writing and conference," "but as savage beasts 
rending and tearing us with their teeth . . . 
greedily hunting after Christ's poor lambs 
. . . misusing their bodies with all exquisite 
tyranny in long and lamentable imprison- 
ment." But Congregationalism was now a 
system ; it had a literature ; it looked for- 
ward to the future. New problems were 
beginning to emerge as the communities 
multiplied. The relation of Churches to 
each other, the transfer of members, the 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINS WORTH III 



question of unfaithful pastors, demanded a 
declaration of principle. In forty-five articles 
the 11 Confession " prescribed for doctrine and 
practice. The True Description of Barrow 
was written in prison. It was ideal, mystical, 
the picture, unshadowed by failure and dis- 
appointment, of the New Jerusalem coming 
down from heaven like a bride adorned for 
her husband. It shone with an unsullied 
radiance. But this is the " Confession " of a 
Church in the actual world, assailed not only 
without, but also within, by mutual strife, for 
judgment has begun in the house of God. 
There is to be no wavering in duty. The 
people of God are to come out of the corrupt 
Church of England in which they are en- 
dangering their salvation. The doctrine is 
Calvinistic. The attitude of the manifesto 
is Barrowist rather than Brownist. The 
ministry depends upon the call of the 
Church, and is not to be usurped by any. 
Yet it marks no advance in toleration upon 
either Barrow or Browne, for the magistrate 
is to root out all false ministries and all 
counterfeit worship of God. 

We must retrace our steps, however, and 
follow the fortunes of the pastor of the 
Church, Francis Johnson, whom we have left 
imprisoned in London. The man himself 



112 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



has been very diversely estimated. Governor 
Bradford, who had known him, said " a very 
grave man he was and an able teacher ; and 
was the most solemn in all his administra- 
tions that we have seen any." On the other 
hand, the pervert Lawne, whom he excom- 
municated, assailed and defamed him with 
the most venomous hatred. Strangely 
enough, Mr, Arber, in what professes to be 
his " scientifically written M account of the 
matter, accepts Lawne without reserve, and 
describes Johnson as " a thoroughly bad 
man," u a dead Christian," and " an utter dis- 
grace to our sacred faith." Probably the 
impartial student, who tries sympathetic- 
ally to reproduce the past, will feel that this 
man, who made such great sacrifices for his 
convictions, though arbitrary, despotic, and 
utterly unsuited for Congregationalism, was 
unfortunate in his relatives, and was always 
driven on by a mistaken sense of duty. 

Francis Johnson was a son of an ex-Mayor 
of Richmond, in Yorkshire, and was born 
about 1562. In due course, like his brother 
George, he entered Christ's College, Cam- 
bridge, where, matriculating on April 1, 
1579, he passed on to his M.A., and was sub- 
sequently elected to a fellowship. It is all 
important to notice how absolutely Presby- 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINSWORTH 1 1 3 

terianism coloured and possessed his mind at 
this time, and we may question whether at 
heart he was ever really in sympathy with 
anything else. On January 6, 1588, he 
preached at St. Mary's, Cambridge, on Peter 
v. 1-4, and insisted on the Scripturalness of 
the Presbyterian form of Church government. 
It was like the man to choose the most 
public place in which to defy Whitgift. Of 
course he was imprisoned and expelled from 
the University. A little later we find him 
chaplain to the English merchants in Middle- 
berg, in Zeeland,as Cartwright had been, and in 
enjoyment of the comfortable salary of £200 
a year. There is no more singular or im- 
pressive chapter in the history of the Church 
than that of the conversion of its persecutors, 
baul of Tarsus went to Damascus to seize 
the disciples, being exceedingly mad against 
them, but was arrested by Christ to be the 
greatest preacher of the Cross. In 1591, 
Johnson lighted upon The Plaine Refuta- 
tion of Mr. affords Book, by Barrow and 
Greenwood, which was being printed at Dort. 
Being " exceedingly mad M against the 
Brownists, he induced the magistrates to 
confiscate the entire edition and consign it to 
the flames. He stood by to see that the 
destruction was complete, but rescued two 
9 



114 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



copies of the volume that he might read and 
refute it. In the quiet of his study he was 
convinced by its reasonings, and it may be 
noted that fourteen years later, as an act of 
justice, he reprinted the edition at his own 
expense. From this point he was himself a 
Brownist. At least, it should be remembered 
to his credit, that he unhesitatingly gave up 
his comfortable berth and faced imprison- 
ment and privation. At once he flew to 
Londpn and sought out Barrow in the Fleet. 
In 1592, as we have seen, he was elected 
pastor of the London Church, and was 
arrested with Greenwood at the house of Mr. 
Boyes, on Ludgate Hill. He escaped death 
when Barrow and Greenwood were hanged 
at Tyburn, but for the next five years he was 
imprisoned in the Clink, his brother George 
being at the time in the Fleet, and the elder, 
Daniel Studley, in Newgate. 

After Francis Johnson had been a prisoner 
for five years, some of the Separatists were 
released from confinement. Several among 
them found their way to Holland; but it was 
a condition of the release of Francis and 
George Johnson, Daniel Studley, and John 
Clarke, a " stiff-necked " Separatist, that they 
should sail for the island of Rainea, in the 
Gulf of St. Lawrence, with some merchant 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND A INS WORTH 1 1 5 



adventurers. On April 8, 1597, they left 
England in the Hopewell and the Chancewell y 
but the latter soon ran upon the rocks, and 
her consort, having rescued all on board, 
returned to England. The poor exiles con- 
trived to hide in London, and in September 
escaped to Amsterdam. 

The Ancient Church now numbered about 
three hundred communicants. It had with 
it as officers the grave and able pastor, 
Francis Johnson, the learned Ainsworth as 
teacher, beside the elders and a deacon. 
It had an ancient widow as deaconess. 
" She honoured her place, and was an orna- 
ment to the congregation. She usually sat 
in a convenient place in the congregation, 
with a little birchen rod in her hand, and 
kept little children in great awe from dis- 
turbing the congregation. She did frequently 
visit the sick and weak, especially women, 
and, as there was need, called out maids and 
young women to watch, and do their other 
helps as their necessity did require, and if 
they were very poor, she would gather relief 
for them of those that were able, or acquaint 
the deacons ; and she was obeyed as a 
mother in Israel and an officer of Christ." 

In 1603, the exiled Church sent mes- 
sengers — probably Johnson and Ainsworth — 



Il6 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



to present an address to James I. on his 
accession. Nothing is more touching in 
these records than the unshakable loyalty 
to the Throne of the first Separatists. 
"They made a good end and prayed for 
your Majesty" might have been said of 
many others besides Barrow and Greenwood. 
No doubt they hoped for milder treatment 
from the new monarch. They prepared a 
statement of the heads of difference between 
themselves and the Church of England ; then 
a Supplication, but they could get no hearing. 
They received no help from the Puritan clergy, 
who, in their own Address to the Throne, 
described the Separatists as those " absurd 
Brownists." At last, the petition, having been 
reduced to seventeen lines, was presented by 
a courtier, but it only obtained the Royal 
frown. 

We have repeatedly noticed that the 
Brownists paid little heed to the warning 
of the Apostle, " Who art thou that judges t 
another man's servant ? " They had an alto- 
gether exaggerated view of the duty of 
mutual warning and rebuking. That the 
Church of England had no discipline was 
not a sufficient reason for practising a dis- 
cipline which was excessive, inquisitorial, 
Pharisaical, and mischievous. There was no 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINSWORTH II7 



error in doctrine so minute that it could be 
disregarded. Christ had left a law for His 
Church, which could not be varied in the 
slightest iota. There was nothing too trivial 
or paltry for the scrutiny of a Church member. 
It is not pleasant to dwell upon the quarrels, 
the scandals, the stormy Church meetings of 
the Ancient Church, both in London and 
Amsterdam, and it is only fair to remember 
that they were largely due to departures 
from Congregational ideals and principles. 
But, like the tragedy on the threshold of the 
Apostolic Church, they read at the beginning 
of Congregationalism a sad and permanent 
lesson of its peril and snare. 

The story of the incessant disputes in the 
Ancient Church is narrated by George John- 
son, in a closely printed quarto volume of 
214 pages, entitled, A Discourse of some 
Troubles and Excommunications in the 
Banished English Church at Amsterdam. 
No one with any semblance of the judicial 
faculty would for a moment accept the story 
as set down by this partial and bitter witness. 
It is, on the face of it, an ex parte statement. 
But even as it stands we feel that Francis 
Johnson had much to bear from his fraternal 
admonisher. The trouble began with the 
remnant of the Church still left in London, 



Il8 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



and of course there was a woman in the case. 
Francis had married secretly, in the Clink, 
Mrs. Thomasine Boyes, the widow of the 
friend in whose house on Ludgate Hill he 
had been arrested. She brought him a dowry 
of ^"300. Whether it was a suitable match 
is beside the mark. Her enemies disparaged 
her as "a bouncing girl" addicted to ex- 
travagant dress. Governor Bradford, on the 
other hand, says, " She ware such apparel as 
she had been formerly used to " ; and again, 
" In our time his wife was a grave matron 
and very modest both in her apparel and all 
her demeanour, ready to do any good works 
in her place." She was certainly the driving 
force behind the pastor. The crusade of 
George against his sister-in-law began in 
London. He charged her before the Church 
with being as proud as the wife of the Bishop 
of London, with wearing four or five gold 
rings, and that her hat was too toppish. At 
length he applied to her the words of 
Jer. iii. 3. The trouble broke out again 
almost immediately after the migration to 
Amsterdam. We can readily imagine that 
the relict of Mr. Boyes never forgave 
Jer. iii. 3. Moreover, the half-starving 
members of the Church could not be ex- 
pected to look kindly upon the gold rings 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND AINS WORTH 



119 



and flounces of the pastor's wife. Con- 
ferences were held repeatedly between the 
brothers. A solemn discussion took place in 
the Church meeting as to whether the afore- 
mentioned hat was too toppish. The gown 
was ordered to be produced. It was charged 
further that the pastor's wife lay in bed till 
nine o'clock on a Lord's Day morning. At 
length, in 1599, Francis Johnson pronounced 
excommunication upon his brother George, 
and expelled him from the Church as a slan- 
derer and a libeller. Still more unfortunately, 
in 1602, the old father, John Johnson, ap- 
peared upon the scene, took the part of 
George, and was excommunicated by the 
Church. It is a sordid and depressing story 
of an arbitrary pastor impelled by the tears 
of an angry wife, on the one hand, and of an 
essentially small, coarse, narrow, though sin- 
cere nature on the other. Governor Bradford 
thus sums up the story : — 

"The Church did, after long patience 
towards them and much pains taken with 
them, excommunicate them for their un- 
reasonable and endless opposition and such 
things as did accompany the same." 

We can only summarise briefly the suc- 
cession of troubles which later on befel the 
Ancient Church, until we deal with the 



120 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



secession of Henry Ainsworth. First of all, 
Thomas White, who had come from the 
West of England in 1603, two years later 
left the Church, it is said, through unsatis- 
fied ambition, and published a Discovery of 
Brownism, a very spiteful and slanderous 
work. Francis Johnson replied. This was 
followed by the arrival of John Smyth in 
1607, and his secession with Helwys, Morton, 
and a considerable company in 1609. Chris- 
topher Lawne was expelled in 161 1, and in 
161 2 published, with three other former 
members of the Ancient Church, The 
Profane Schism of the Brownists or Sepa- 
ratists, an unrestrained attack upon Francis 
Johnson and his people, charging them with 
injustice, cruelty, and lewdness. In 161 2, 
Daniel Studley was deposed from the elder- 
ship — a long-delayed, but richly deserved 
penalty on a man guilty of immorality, 
whose influence in the Church had worked 
immense mischief. 

These episodes, painful as they were, must 
be regarded as less serious than the final dis- 
pute between Francis Johnson and Ainsworth. 
It is infinitely sad that two good men, who 
had made such sacrifices for conviction, both 
of them inevitably driven on by their concep- 
tion of truth and duty, should, like Paul and 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND A1NS WORTH 121 



Barnabas, have such sharp contention and be 
sundered for the rest of life. We have already 
seen that the more elaborate Congrega- 
tionalism of Barrow, in the True Descrip- 
tion, tended to set the elders apart as a 
ruling class. This was not the intention of 
Barrow, who said most emphatically, " All the 
affairs of the Church belong to that body 
together." But Francis Johnson accentuated 
the functions, dignity, and power of the 
elder, until the authority of the Church had 
been entirely absorbed. Congregationalism 
became under him autocratic, oligarchical, 
and aristocratic. He profoundly distrusted 
popular government. Together with Studley, 
he claimed to set aside the elections of the 
Church. He repudiated the notion that the 
Church had power to appoint its own minister 
or to receive and exclude members. The 
controversy between the Presbyterians and 
the Separatists chiefly centred in Matt.xviii. 17, 
" Tell it to the Church," which the one inter- 
preted, " to the elders," and the other, " to the 
people." Barrow always contended for the 
exercise of discipline by the Church, but 
Francis Johnson claimed that "the people 
are to have no voices in excommunication." 
By this time but little of Johnson's Congrega- 
tionalism was left, and it is more accurate 



122 BAPTIST 6> CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



henceforth to describe him simply as a Sepa- 
ratist. Ainsworth, much as he loved peace, 
could not see with indifference everything for 
which he had endured exile quietly swept 
away. He stoutly maintained a moderate 
Congregationalism, that the ruling power 
was not in pope, prelate, elder, or con- 
gregation, but in Christ Himself, who had 
given to every man his work. " That 
authority to administer the sacrament," he 
wrote, "should belong to every one of the 
Church we utterly deny ; no sacraments are 
to be administered until the pastor or 
teacher be chosen and ordained into their 
office." But he held that the power to elect 
its officers and to exercise discipline re- 
mained with the Church. 

There was no via media between these 
interpretations. Ainsworth, when he could 
no longer endure the daily friction and 
strife, withdrew with a large following and 
began to worship two doors off in the Jews' 
Synagogue. No half measures would con- 
tent the burning zeal of Johnson, who deposed 
and excommunicated his former colleague 
and all who were with him. But on an 
appeal to the magistrates by the chief 
owners of the old meeting-house, the Ains- 
worthians were restored to the use of the 



FRANCIS JOHNSON AND A INS WORTH 12$ 



buildings, and the Franciscans, as they were 
called, were driven out. Poor Francis, in 
1613, migrated to Emden with his dis- 
heartened flock, but in 161 7 he was back 
again in Amsterdam, only, however, to die 
in the January following, still styling himself 
the pastor of the Ancient Church. Almost 
his last act, "a few days before his death," 
was to issue A Christian Plea y which was 
misrepresented by Matthew Slade as a final 
recantation, but which really maintained 
his separatism while reaffirming his dif- 
ferences from Ainsworth and Robinson. 
Of the people, those who did not rejoin 
Ainsworth went out, with an amazing 
courage, across the Atlantic in a small and 
ill-found vessel, under the leadership of Elder 
Blackwell. We can only imagine the horrors 
of the voyage — a hundred and eighty persons 
" packed like herrings," drifting aimlessly 
about, the captain dead, a miserable, broken 
remnant of fifty reaching Virginia in March, 
1619. As to the section with Ainsworth, in 
whose succession of later pastors was num- 
bered John Canne, the founder of Broadmead 
Baptist Church, Bristol, we find that early in 
the eighteenth century it united with the 
Presbyterian Church in Amsterdam. 

The contrast is pathetic between the ardent 



124 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



young pastor of 1592, who has found the 
truth and for joy thereof fasts everything 
away that he may possess it, and the disap- 
pointed, broken man of 1617, prematurely 
old, scarcely knowing whether he is a Con- 
gregationalist at all. Was it worth while for 
this to suffer the loathsome Clink, exile 
quarrels at home, in the city, and in the 
Church ? " Though I have all knowledge 
. . . and though I give my body to be 
burnt, and have not charity, it profiteth me 
nothing." Congregationalism had a weary 
path to tread before it discovered the bond 
of Church life, which consists not in know- 
ledge, but in love. 



VI 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 

* \ T ONE of the English Separatists," 
1 \| says Bishop Creighton, " had a finer 
mind or a more beautiful soul than John 
Smyth. None of them succeeded in ex- 
pressing with so much reasonableness and 
consistency their aspirations after a spiritual 
system of religious belief and practice. None 
of them founded their opinions on so large 
and liberal a basis." 

We have now reached the stage at which 
it becomes historically correct to speak of 
the English Baptists in the modified sense 
that, while they were not immersionists, 
they limited baptism to believers. John 
Smyth has a rightful claim to be regarded 
as the founder of the modern Baptist 
Churches, because he broke away from 

Brownism on the issue of believers' baptism ; 
125 



126 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



he formed the first English Baptist Church 
from the exiles in Amsterdam ; and in his 
noble and historic Confession he formulated 
the Baptist principles, separated, like gold 
from dross, from those elements of Anabap- 
tism which would never have commended 
themselves to the practical English mind. 

The rise of the modern Baptist was as 
inevitable as the rise of the Congregationalist, 
as soon as the New Testament was freely cir- 
culated in the common tongue. Brownism 
was, in fact, an instance of unstable equi- 
librium. Probably the first Separatists were 
quite unable to consider dispassionately any 
doctrine associated with the name Anabaptist. 
As a term of contempt it had no rival in the 
ecclesiastical vocabulary. Moreover, the fact 
that the Old Testament had to them equal 
authority with the New, prepared them to 
see in baptism the analogue of circumcision 
in the Abrahamic Covenant. But since the 
Separatists held that every particular of the 
Church's order and ceremony had been pre- 
scribed by Christ and His apostles, and must 
not be varied in the least degree, some one 
was certain to demand ere long, " Why, then, 
do you baptize infants ? " Browne, Barrow, 
and the Ancient Church in its Confession 
of 1 596, agreed that the seed of the faithful, 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 127 



though infants, were to be offered for entrance 
into the Church in baptism. Yet if, as 
Browne held, baptism was the grafting into 
and putting on of Christ, why should it be 
administered to infants ? Indeed, Barrow got 
into inextricable confusion in his contention 
that without a true baptism there was no true 
Church membership, that there could be no 
true baptism without a true ministry, and 
that the ministry of the Church of England 
was false. This was the only baptism he 
had ever received. Must he, then, be bap- 
tized again ? Well might he ask, " What, 
then, is to be done in this distress ? " His 
ingenious device of the distinction between 
a false and an adulterate baptism was not 
very convincing. " There is no remedy," 
jeered Bishop Hall ; " you must go forward 
into Anabaptism or come back to us." " All 
your Rabbins cannot answer the charge of 
your re-baptized brother, John Smyth." 

The place and date of John Smyth's birth 
are both unknown, and indeed the chronology 
of his career up to his migration to Amster- 
dam is invested with much uncertainty. To 
begin with, let us get rid of those mistaken 
traditions about him which it is possible 
absolutely to disprove. He was not the John 
Smyth who matriculated at Christ's College 



128 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



in 1571, and graduated in 1575-6. He was 
not the Separatist Smith who was imprisoned 
in the Marshalsea for nine months in 1592. 
He was never vicar of Gainsborough, the 
living there being held successively by John 
Jackson, Jerome Phillips, and Henry Clifford, 
from 1566 to-1610. Like most of the Sepa- 
ratist leaders, he was a University man ; and 
one fact which helps to fix the date of his 
course at Cambridge is that he was a pupil, 
at Christ's College, of Francis Johnson, who, 
as we have noticed, matriculated in 1579. 
John Smyth proceeded to his M.A. in 1593, 
and, if his educational career was normal, we 
may infer that he was born about 1570, and 
entered the University about 1586. These 
dates seem to confirm the statement of 
Bernard, that John Smyth was ordained a 
clergyman by Wickham, Bishop of Lincoln, 
whose episcopate extended into 1594. No 
evidence can be found to support Bernard's 
further allusion to him as holding a benefice, 
though Mr. Pike has discovered that a John 
Smyth became vicar of Hutton Cranswicke, 
in the diocese of York, on November 23, 1593, 
and that the next vicar was appointed on 
December 1, 1601. But we reach historical 
certainty with the election of John Smyth as 
lecturer or preacher of the city of Lincoln. A 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPT1S1 I2Q 



few months ago, the Rev. E. C. Pike discovered, 
in the Minutes of the Lincoln Corporation, the 
record of Smyth's appointment to this office 
on September 27, 1600, by eight votes to seven. 
On the 21st of October, his stipend was fixed 
at £40 a year, with £3 6s. 8d. for house- 
rent. On August 1, 1602, the Council, appa- 
rently well pleased with his services, assured 
this stipend to him for the rest of his life by 
seal of the Corporation, but on October 13th 
the vote was annulled, and he was deposed 
from his office for having " approved himself 
a factious man in this city by personal 
preaching, and that untruly against divers 
men of good place." Perhaps he may have 
inveighed against some of the city fathers. 
He was inhibited by the Bishop of the diocese. 
The Council Minutes of December 13th, while 
describing him as " the late preacher of this 
city," indicate that a lawsuit was threatened 
against the Corporation for the stipend 
assured to him. These entries are entirely 
incompatible with the statement and con- 
sequent inferences of Mr. Arber, that John 
Smyth was lecturer in Lincoln from 1603 to 
1605. 

After the abrupt termination of his lecture- 
ship, Smyth published two little volumes of 
discourses preached by himself at Lincoln, 
10 



130 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



which strikingly illustrate the strength and 
richness of his mind, as well as the earnest- 
ness and sincerity of his search for truth. It 
is important to notice that he was still an 
Anglican, when he prepared these works for 
the press. The first was discovered in the 
library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, by 
Professor Whitsitt in 1880. It is entitled, 
The bright morning star, or the resolution 
and exposition of the 22 Psalm, preached 
publicly in four sermons, at Lincoln, by 
fohn Smyth, preacher of the citie. Printed 
1603. The other little book, of which a 
copy of the first edition is in the Regent's 
Park College Library, is entitled, A Pattern 
of True Prayer by John Smyth, Minister 
and Preacher of the Word of God, and was 
entered at Stationers' Hall, on March 22, 
1605. The author states that he delivered 
this treatise not long since to the ears of a 
few, being the lecturer in the city of Lincoln. 
It is dedicated to Lord Sheffield, who had 
acted as arbiter between the Corporation and 
the preacher. Reading between the lines, we 
can see that the dispute was not settled in 
1603, and that John Smyth still claimed his 
title as city preacher, but the difference had 
been "managed" in 1605. The book is an 
exposition of the Lord's Prayer, published to 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST I3I 



clear himself of unjust accusations. He is 
no longer in Lincoln — " when I taught in 
Lincoln," he says. He thinks " a uniform 
order of public prayer in the service of God 
is necessary," but he concludes with much 
reasonableness, "he that prayeth the Lord's 
Prayer in truth and matter prayeth well " 
. . . yet u I had rather speak five words to 
God in prayer from understanding, faith, and 
feeling, than say the Lord's Prayer over a 
thousand times ignorantly, negligently, and 
superstitiously." He is not a Separatist, 
"yet there are some," he says, "whom we 
will account brethren, though they do not 
so reckon us, seeing they have separated from 
us " ; and again, " I do here ingenuously con- 
fess that I am far from the opinion of them 
which separate from our Church concerning 
the set form of prayer (although from some 
of them I received part of my education 
at Cambridge)" — a reference, doubtless, to 
Francis Johnson. 

John Smyth was still " far from " Separa- 
tism when, towards the close of 1604 or early 
in 1605, the Pattern went to the press, but 
his mind moved swiftly, and it is certain that 
he was at this time in the Gainsborough dis- 
trict passing through the stage of doubting. 

It is necessary, at this point, to describe 



132 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



a Separatist movement which had arisen 
partly as the result of the zealous labours of 
some Puritan clergy on the borders of three 
counties, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and Not- 
tinghamshire. From the neighbouring towns 
and villages of the district, a number of godly 
persons began to assemble on the Lord's 
Day at the Scrooby Manor House. Not far 
away was Babworth, where Richard Clyfton 
was rector, and Worksop, with Bernard the 
Puritan clergyman, and Gainsborough, a 
notable town from which, on a clear day, 
the Lincoln minster can be seen. Gains- 
borough had been associated with some of 
the most interesting persons and events in 
English history. Here, in the Palace by the 
beautiful Trent, King Alfred was married, 
and here Canute was born. The lord of the 
manor himself had fine traditions of suffering 
for conscience' sake. In 1602, those whose 
hearts the Lord had touched with zeal for 
His truth " formed themselves by covenant 
into a Church of the Congregational order." 
In 1606, the distance for some being great, 
the Church divided into two parts, one 
remaining at Gainsborough and the other 
worshipping at the Scrooby Manor House. 
John Smyth was in the Gainsborough 
Church, notes Bradford, as a private member, 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST I 33 



and "afterwards was chosen their pastor." 
He became in fact, as well as in the opinion 
both of Bishop Hall and Bernard, a ring- 
leader of the separation. 

There was an interval of three or four 
years between the date in 1602 at which 
the Lincoln lectureship ceased, and the date 
in 1605 or 1606 when John Smyth became a 
Separatist. It is known that he lingered in 
the city of Lincoln in dispute with the Cor- 
poration ; that he went to Worksop to confer 
with his " old friend " Bernard ; that the 
Ecclesiastical Commission was harsh towards 
him, and that twice he escaped the pur- 
suivants of the Archbishop ; that he went to 
Coventry to confer with Barbon and others, 
as to whether it was right to leave a true but 
corrupt Church; that for nine months at least 
he was in doubt and suspense ; and that he 
lay sick unto death at the house of Helwys 
at Basford, in Nottinghamshire. Bernard 
moves through the story, a hesitating and 
unhappy figure, at one point meditating 
escape to the Continent, at another, gathering 
round him a hundred godly persons from 
different parishes as a Church within a 
Church, holding conference with Robinson 
and Helwys and coming to his final decision, 
"Well, I will return home and preach as I 



134 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



have done, and I must say, as Naaman did, 
the Lord be merciful to me in this thing." 
As the shadow of ecclesiastical penalty fell 
upon him, in 1603, he drew back, but 
John Smyth "marched breast forward" and 
" never fell back from any truth " he saw. 

It was impossible for the Separatists of 
Gainsborough and Scrooby to remain in 
England. Persecutions gathered around 
them with increasing violence, and they 
began to turn their eyes away from these 
inhospitable shores to the land where so 
many of their brethren had found a refuge. 
Probably the Gainsborough group was the 
first to go, with John Smyth, Helwys, 
Morton, and a large company. It is not 
possible to assign any other than an ap- 
proximate date. Smyth had not long been 
pastor of the Church, but he was swift in 
his decisions and movements. Helwys was 
eager to go, for on July 26, 1607, his wife, 
Joan, had been brought before the Eccle- 
siastical Commission and then confined in 
York Castle. "It was Mr. Helwys," says 
John Robinson, " who above all other guides 
or others furthered this passage into strange 
countries ; and if any brought oars he 
brought sails." A further help as to the 
date is derived from the fact that, while 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 35 



Smyth was still pastor at Gainsborough, he 
addressed a letter to Bernard, to which the 
latter replied six or seven months afterwards 
in a volume entitled, Christian Advertise- 
ments y which was entered at Stationers' 
Hall, June 18, 1608. The reply may have 
been written a month or two earlier. This 
would bring us to a period between September 
and December, 1607, during which Smyth's 
letter was written. In all probability, the 
migration took place towards the close of 
1607. 

The changes in John Smyth's theological 
position after he reached Amsterdam were 
so rapid that we must pause for a moment 
to look more closely at this extraordinary 
man. He was open-minded to a fault, eager 
to search for and to receive the truth. His 
conscience was sensitive and even morbid, 
and he could not rest a moment in silence if 
he felt that he had embraced an error. 
Ecclesiastical ties, Church fellowship, old 
comrades, all were as nothing to him com- 
pared with truth. This frail, dauntless man 
could see the whole world of his thought 
suddenly dissolved, and could enter a new 
universe without a tremor. The remarkable 
thing was that his magnetic personality 
always drew others after him, and that even 



I36 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



those from whom he parted and who excom- 
municated him could write of their desire to 
retain him, " Yea, what would we not have 
endured, or done ; would we not have lost all 
we had, yea, would we not have plucked out 
our eyes ; would we not have laid down our 
lives ? . . . And all our love was too little for 
him and not worthy of him." It is true that 
John Robinson found his instability a sore 
cross. But if we are to understand fully 
these rapid changes, we must remember how 
completely Smyth was held in the grip of an 
inexorable logic. The treatises and pam- 
phlets of the Separatists were written by 
Cambridge men, who had adopted the 
logical methods in vogue at the University. 
Browne had railed in his notes on Matthew 
xxiii. at the logic-chopping preachers of his 
day. Francis Johnson conducted Church 
meetings with the aid of irritating syllo- 
gisms. John Smyth's reply to Bernard was 
a succession of majors, minors, and ergos. 
We shall not understand this Baptist pioneer 
at all, until we recognise that his eager and 
untrammelled mind simply rose up and went 
forth as an exile, whenever he saw the 
beckoning hand of a properly constructed 
syllogism. Indeed, it is impossible to deny 
the force of his defence after his supreme 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 37 



intellectual and spiritual migration — " To 
change a false religion is commendable, and 
to retain a false religion is damnable. For a 
man of a Turk to become a Jew, of a Jew to 
become a papist, of a papist to become a 
Protestant, are all commendable changes, 
though they all of them befall one and the 
same person in one year, nay, if it were in 
one month." 

On his arrival in Amsterdam, Smyth began 
to practise as a physician, taking nothing, 
however, from his poorer patients. Of 
money he was quite careless, discharging his 
functions as pastor without any salary, and 
even stripping the clothes from his own back, 
that he might aid those needier than himself. 
It has been much discussed whether he and 
his company joined themselves to the 
Church of Johnson and Ainsworth when 
they first came to the city. Dr. Dexter 
thought they did when he wrote his monu- 
mental work, but in The True Story of John 
Smyth he altered his view of the matter, 
since in the Differences Smyth described his 
own community as " the second English 
Church at Amsterdam." 

Mr. Powicke argues that Dr. Dexter's 
earlier judgment was correct, and cites three 
passages to prove that it was after its further 



I38 BAPTIST 6» CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



secession that it became the " second Church." 
Two of the passages, however, speak simply 
of " communion " which might easily exist 
between two separate Churches, and the third 
is so highly figurative that no argument 
should be founded upon it : " Soon after 
this God stroke him with blindness, that he 
could no longer find the door of the Church, 
out of which he was gone by schism, and 
which he had assaulted with error." It is 
difficult to see how Smyth could have re- 
tained and exercised his pastoral office in the 
Ancient Church of which Francis Johnson 
was minister. 

Just before leaving England or soon after 
reaching Amsterdam, John Smyth published 
Principles and Inferences concerning the 
Visible Churchy in which he maintained the 
Brownist theory of Church government. It 
was followed very shortly by Parallels, Cen- 
sures ', and Observations ', which was dated by 
the printer 1609, but which must have been 
written not later than the beginning of 1608. 
" I published," he says in the Parallels, " a 
little method not long since, entitled Prin- 
ciples and Inferences" As yet he was a 
Brownist, and there had been no break with 
the Ancient Church. The Parallels was a 
Teply to Bernard's Christian Advertisements, 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 39 



and contained Smyth's letter to which we 
have already referred, divided into nineteen 
sections, with Observations on each section. 
Almost immediately after, Smyth, with about 
eighty others, gave up communion with the 
Ancient Church, and in the same year, 1608, 
published The Differences of the Churches of 
the Separation in defence of his action. It is 
important to notice that he was not yet a 
Baptist, and that the separation was upon 
another and very singular ground. Again 
we must plead his unfortunate logic as an 
extenuation. He admitted, in the Differences, 
that the " Ancient brethren n had restored the 
primitive and apostolic order of the Church, 
but he had reached the conclusion that, since 
the worship of the Church must be spiritual, 
and since printed words were signs and 
therefore partook of the nature of cere- 
monies, and seeing that Christ closed the 
book before He began to preach in the 
synagogue at Nazareth, it was wrong for the 
minister to have a book, even a translation 
of the Bible, before his eyes during prophesy- 
ing. He added other reasons for separation, 
viz., that the eldership was uniform, and that 
only believers might contribute to Church 
funds ; but the first was the chief, that " there 
was no warrant to bring translations of scrip- 



140 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



ture into the Church." We smile at such 
scruples, but it was all terribly serious to him, 
and he began his ecclesiastical life afresh. 

The supreme change was yet to come — 
the change in John Smyth's theological posi- 
tion, which has had the most momentous and 
far-reaching results. He became a Baptist. 
Again, his wonderful charm and persuasive- 
ness drew others after him, including Helwys 
and Morton, and he formed the first English 
Baptist Church. No doubt he had come 
under Mennonite influence and teaching, and 
by^the end of March, 1609 (N.S.), he had 
arrived at a definite decision. He published 
The Character of the Beast, in which he ex- 
pounded his Baptist views. He contended 
that "infants ought not to be baptized, 
because (1) there is neither precept nor 
example in the New Testament of any 
infants that were baptized by John or 
Christ's disciples, and (2) Christ commanded 
to make disciples by teaching them and then 
to baptize them." 

John Smyth and his company were met 
on the threshold by an apparently insuper- 
able difficulty. If infant baptism was no 
baptism at all, then, apart from the Dutch 
Anabaptists, to whom he was not yet pre- 
pared to turn, there was no one to baptize 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 141 



him, since an unbaptized person could not 
administer the rite. Again his logic came to 
the aid of this fearless man, and he solved the 
problem by baptizing himself. " After much 
straining of courtesy who should begin," says 
John Robinson, and there is a note of deri- 
sion in his words, "Mr. Smyth baptized first 
himself and next Mr. Helwys, and so the rest 
making their particular confessions." Bishop 
Creighton regards the matter, however, with a 
juster mind, and urges that " Smyth was only 
acting logically upon the general principles 
of the Separatists. If the history of the 
Church was to begin again, it might as well 
begin from the beginning." Smyth replied 
to the objection that he had no warrant to 
baptize himself, " I say, as much as you have 
to set up a true Church ... for baptizing a 
man's self, there is as good warrant as for 
a man churching himself." So he baptized 
himself, doubtless after the manner of the 
Mennonites, which was by pouring, and 
hence he has been called the se-Baptist, or 
self-Baptist. 

In this connection, we must deal with a 
gross and palpable forgery of the Minutes of 
the Church at Crowle, in Lincolnshire, which 
was devised to prove that Smyth was im- 
mersed in the river Don by Morton. The 



142 BAPTIST &> CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Rev. Jabez Stutterd, the General Baptist 
minister at Crowie, stated that, in 1866, he 
was shown seven or eight leaves, moth-eaten 
and decayed, which he carefully copied and 
which contained the following record : " 1606, 
24 March. This night at midnight Elder 
John Morton baptized John Smyth, vicar of 
Gainsborough, in the river Don. It was so 
dark we were obliged to have torch-lights. 
Elder Brewster prayed and Mr. Smyth made 
a good confession. Walked to Epworth in 
his cold clothes, but received no harm. The 
distance was two miles. All our friends were 
present. A strong wind but fair above head. 
To ye triune God be all ye praise." It is 
worth while noticing the undoubted errors in 
these few lines. As we have seen, Smyth did 
not become a Baptist earlier than 1608, he 
was never vicar of Gainsborough, and further, 
if it was fair overhead on March 24, 1606, it 
could not have been so dark, as the moon 
came to the full the night before. The whole 
thing was, however, a clumsy forgery, which 
has been completely exposed in detail by 
Dr. Dexter. 

This religious wanderer had yet one more 
journey to take. He came to the conclusion 
that the Mennonites in Amsterdam were a 
true Church and had a true baptism. For two 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 43 



generations they had practised the baptism 
of believers. If we may speak of an apostolic 
succession in ideas, we may link them to the 
primitive Church. All through the centuries, 
like a river sometimes flowing in hidden 
depths and sometimes emerging to the light, 
there has been a spiritual community holding 
the baptismal sign of the regenerate life of 
faith. Now appearing, now disappearing, we 
can see them on the highlands of Armenia 
with traditions of Thaddaeus as their founder, 
passing on through the Byzantine Empire, 
following the course of the Danube, the Po, 
the Rhone, the Rhine, always passing along 
the great rivers, until at last they reach the 
plain of the Netherlands, invariably with 
one theological mark, an ancient if heretical 
view of the Person of Christ. " I deny all 
succession except in the truth," said John 
Smyth ; but he felt that he ought not to have 
baptized himself when by his side was the 
Mennonite Church. Together with forty-one 
others who confessed their error in baptizing 
themselves, and who desired " to get back 
into the true Church of Christ " as speedily 
as possible, he applied for membership with 
the Mennonites. He parted company with 
Helwys, who considered that he had sinned 
against the Holy Ghost in doubting as to his 



144 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



own baptism. He was never received by the 
Mennonites. Perhaps the quarrels of the 
Ancient Church, or Smyth's repeated changes, 
made them wary. They required a state- 
ment of doctrine to be submitted. The 
inquiry dragged on after the se-Baptist him- 
self had passed away. Not till January 20, 
161 5 (N.S.), was consent given. Eleven 
names of the forty-two had to be struck out 
through death or defection, and on that date 
the remaining thirty-one were admitted into 
the Mennonite communion. 

Four Confessions of Faith remain as records 
of the theology of Smyth and Helwys and 
their two companies. The first, consisting 
of twenty Articles written in Latin, was pre- 
pared by John Smyth to meet the Mennonite 
inquiry. The second was a Dutch Confes- 
sion written by the Mennonite minister, 
Hans de Rys, which was accepted and signed 
by Smyth. The third, written by Helwys, 
placed the creed of himself and his company 
before the Mennonites in twenty-six Articles, 
Last of all, the se-Baptist wrote, very shortly 
before his death, The last book of John Smyth 
called the Retraction of his errors, together 
with his Confession of Faith in One Hundred 
Propositions. The first and third are the 
earliest English Baptist Creeds. 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 4-5 



Of the story little remains to tell. A 
friendly Mennonite, Jan Munter, allowed 
Smyth's Church to occupy a part of his 
" Great Cake House," or bakery ; but their 
leader had not long to live. He was little 
more than forty years of age, but religious 
fervour and privations had worn away a 
frame always fragile and delicate. In the 
summer of 1612, he was taken with his last 
illness, and after lingering in prostration 
through seven weeks, he died of consumption, 
and, on September 1st, was carried from the 
"Cake House M for burial in the " Niewe 
Kirk." 

Thomas Helwys quitted Amsterdam in 
161 1, or early in 161 2, and returned to Eng- 
land with his Church. He came of an 
honourable county family, and at this time 
his kinsman, Sir Gervase Elwes, was Lieu- 
tenant of the Tower of London. Like Smvth, 
Helwys was an Arminian, and the Church 
which he formed and which worshipped in 
Newgate Street, was the first General or 
Arminian Baptist Church on English soil. 
Three little works from his pen may be found 
in the Bodleian to-day, the most important of 
which, The Mystery of Iniquity, contains, on 
its title page, an address to the King, and 
boldly declares that no earthly ruler has any 
II 



I46 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



power over the immortal souls of his subjects. 
Helwys died in 1626, and was succeeded as 
pastor by Morton, who had come over with 
him from Amsterdam, and had shortly after- 
wards been cast into a London prison. He 
also contributed to the literature of religious 
liberty. A little later, the Church returned 
to Amsterdam and joined the Mennonites. 
Its influence and energy were witnessed by 
the fact that, when Helwys passed away, four 
other General Baptist Churches in Lincoln, 
Sarum, Coventry, and Tiverton had been 
formed and were in communion with it. 

When the English Baptist Churches arose, 
the conflict between the followers of Calvin 
and Arminius was at its height. It was a 
dispute which produced curious results and 
cross-divisions. Whitgift was a rigid Calvinist, 
and so were the Puritans and Separatists 
whom he persecuted. Laud was a deter- 
mined Arminian, and the strongly Presby- 
terian House of Commons hated him not less 
for his theology than for his political policy. 
The Independents were Calvinistic, and were 
still further embittered against John Smyth 
by what they called " his gross and damnable 
Arminianism." Both Helwys and he boldly 
repudiated the sterner doctrines of Geneva 
about predestination and irresistible grace. 



tOHN SMYTH, THE SE- BAPTIST 1 47 



In his first Confession, John Smyth declared, 
" Infants are conceived and born in innocency 
without sin and so dying are undoubtedly 
saved." " God doth not predestinate any 
man to destruction." " The sacrifice of God's 
body and blood doth not reconcile God unto 
us, which did never hate us nor was our 
enemy, but reconcileth us unto God." These 
are noble words, and it was a bold thing to 
utter them then. Whence did Smyth derive 
his broad and generous theology ? Probably 
he had read the plea against Calvinism by 
Robert Cooke, the courtier and Anabaptist, 
which Knox replied to, paragraph by para- 
graph, and which also was answered by 
Turner, Dean of Wells, in his Treacle against 
the Poison of Pelagius. Probably Smyth was 
also influenced by the Pelagianism of the 
Mennonites. 

Helwys' Church is of supreme importance 
in the story of toleration. "This obscure 
Baptist Congregation," says Professor Masson, 
" seems to have become the depository for all 
England of the absolute principle of Liberty 
of Conscience." It is the imperishable glory 
of the earliest London Baptist Church that, 
again to quote Masson, "from this little 
dingy meeting-house, somewhere in Old 
London, there flashed out, first in England, 



I48 BAPTIST fr" CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



the absolute doctrine of religious liberty." 
Leonard Busher, a member of this Church, a 
poor man labouring for his daily bread, yet 
with some measure of learning, issued in 1614 
a tractate, entitled, Religions Peace or a plea 
for liberty of conscience, in which, anticipating. 
Milton's Areopagitica, he argued that it 
should be M lawful for any person or persons, 
yea, Jews and Papists, to write, dispute, 
confer, and reason, print and publish any 
matter touching religion." How far the 
Independents at this time fell short of the 
doctrine of Religious Liberty is illustrated 
in Henry Jacob's Confession in 1616. "We 
believe that we and all the visible Churches 
ought to be overseen and kept in order and 
peace, and ought to be governed, under 
Christ, both supremely and also subordi- 
nate^, by the civil magistrate, yea, in causes 
of religion, when need is." 

There is much to admire and love in the 
character of John Smyth. Even u his failings 
leaned to virtue's side." But it was as he 
drew very near to the gates of death that the 
fervent love and piety, the sweetness and 
beauty of this eager, radiant soul were most 
striking and wonderful. In his last declara- 
tion, he wrote, 11 All penitent and faithful 
Christians are brethren in the communion of 



JOHN SMYTH, THE SE-BAPTIST 1 49 



the outward Church, by what name soever 
they are known ; and we salute them all with 
a holy kiss, being heartily grieved that we 
should be rent into so many sorts and 
schisms ; and that only for matters of no 
moment." While he could not "with a good 
conscience " recede from the views he had 
advocated, he deeply regretted the tone in 
which he had written and the censures he 
had passed, both on the Brownists and on the 
Church of England : M I utterly renounce and 
revoke it," he said. Under the shadow of 
death, there fell upon him an awful sense of 
the greatness of the truths in which Christians 
are agreed, and he declared, in words which 
we shall do well to remember, " From this 
day forward do I put an end to all con- 
troversy and question about the outward 
Church and ceremonies with all men, and 
resolve to spend my time in the main matters 
wherein consisteth salvation." 



VII 



JQHX ROBIXSOX—THE PILGRIM 
CHURCH 



X sense of relief, to the noble and com- 
manding figure of John Robinson and to the 
pheasant and unbroken fellowship of the 
Leyden Church, Browne and Francis John- 
son had gone a long way between them to 
wreck early Congregationalism. But the in- 
creasing intoleran :e of the Church of England, 
backed by Stuart duplicity and tyranny, gave 
it a fresh lease of life, and continued to make 
Separatism attractive to Christian men of 
a high type. Each pioneer has marked a 
fresh stage in the development John Robin- 
son rendered the incalculable service of 
shewing that Congregationalism, which had 
been discredited by quarrelsome Churches 
and hopelessly intractable men, was a work- 




Church historian turns, with a 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH If I 



able and practicable system, and contained 
within itself the elements of human advance. 

We have already noted the formation of 
the Church at Gainsborough and the friendly 
division into two sections in i6c6, the one 
remaining with John Smyth, the other hence- 
forth worshipping in the Scrooby Manor 
House, and known as the Pilgrim Church. 
The story has been told by Dr. Brown 
with such beauty and amplitude of learning, 
in Pilgrim Fathers of New England^ that 
we need not do more than glance rapidly 
at the new scenes and actors that appear 
now upon the stage. The village of Scrooby, 
in Nottinghamshire, and on the borders of 
Yorkshire, nestling among its trees and up- 
lands, sleeping by its lovely streams, is 
sacred to the Free Churchman, because, in 
a sense, it was the birthplace of a new order 
and a free empire. Surely it was one of the 
ironies of history that the cradle was in a 
symbolic home of the condemned and dying 
regime. Three hundred years ago, Scrooby 
was of much consecuence as a stage of the 

1 o 

Royal Post on the Great North Road. Its 
"fair palace/' or Manor House, was a seat 
of the Archbishops of York. There, cast 
down from power and broken in heart, 
Wolsey had found a retreat. William Brewster 



152 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



had become postmaster of the Royal service, 
occupied the house himself, and easily found 
space within its walls for the meetings of 
the Pilgrim Church. He was a Cambridge 
man who had been attached to Davison, the 
Puritan Secretary of State and Ambassador 
of Queen Elizabeth to the Netherlands, but, 
on the fall of his patron, the young Brewster's 
dream of rapid advance and high office had 
burst like a bubble. He was intended, in the 
providence of God, to be the leader and ruling 
elder of the Plymouth Church. Three miles 
away, lay the village of Austerfield, where, 
when Brewster was twenty-three years old, 
was born, of an honourable family, a man 
destined to be the statesman and historian 
of the Plymouth Colony. Governor William 
Bradford sat as a youth in the congregation 
of the Scrooby Manor House. Richard 
Clyfton, of Babworth, had become its pastor, 
having given up his rectorship about 1603, 
" a fatherly old man with a great white 
beard." To them came John Robinson ; 
thus God was preparing the leaders and 
gathering the forces to carry on His work. 

John Robinson was a native of Lincoln- 
shire, and perhaps of Gainsborough. Born 
about 1575, he was sent to Corpus Christi 
College, Cambridge, in 1592, and became 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH I S3 



Fellow in 1598. Puritanism was strongly 
represented in the University, and it is 
certain that the young student must have 
been influenced by the distinguished lecturer 
of his own college, the Puritan, William 
Perkins. He was converted in the Church 
of England ; he began his ministry in the 
Church of England in Norwich, "or there- 
abouts," probably as a curate. To be a 
Separatist was distasteful to him, and " had 
not the truth been in" his "heart as a 
burning fire" he would have continued to 
conform. But every Puritan was now finding 
the strain upon his conscience as to vest- 
ments and ceremonies more serious and 
intense, and, after the Hampton Court 
Conference, had to ask himself whether 
Separatism was not a duty. The whole 
responsibility for the Separatism of a 
man like John Robinson rests upon the 
bishops of the Church of England. So 
anxious was he to remain an Anglican that, 
as a modus vivendi^ he applied to the 
Norwich Corporation for the Chaplaincy or 
Mastership of the St. Helen's Hospital, 
which had been held by Robert Harrison ; 
but he was refused. At last, the censures of 
the bishop and increasing persecution drove 
him away. It was natural that his thoughts 



154 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



should turn to Scrooby. He joined the 
Congregation in the Manor House, and 
assisted Clyfton in the pastorate. 

The story of the subsequent flight to 
Holland is in one sense an enigma. The 
legislation of 1593 enacted the banishment 
from the realm of persons convicted of 
persistent Separatism, yet every difficulty 
was put in their way when, oppressed by 
fine and imprisonment, they attempted to 
go. Exile was a familiar idea to them. 
The'story of the Ancient Church in Amster- 
dam was well known. Church life and 
worship at Scrooby had become impossible. 
Their leader, William Brewster, who had 
been deprived of his position as postmaster, 
was being hunted for. In the autumn of 
1607, therefore, the members of the Manor 
House Church resolved to leave their native 
land. The account of how they fared has 
been set down by Governor Bradford. The 
first attempt to escape to a more friendly 
shore was a disastrous failure. The pilgrims 
hired a vessel to sail from Boston, the quaint 
old Lincolnshire town, but, when they were 
all on board, the officers of the law, to whom 
they had been betrayed by the captain, 
seized and searched them, robbed them of 
their money, and finally carried them off 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH I 55 



to the magistrates. There was a leaven of 
Puritanism in the whole district, and the 
prisoners seem to have been treated with 
some consideration. They were, however, 
committed to the cells of the Guildhall ; 
then all were sent back to Scrooby, except 
seven ringleaders, including Brewster. After 
communications with the Privy Council, the 
seven were liberated and bound over to 
appear at the Assizes. 

The second attempt was even more 
tragically a chapter of accidents. This time 
the pilgrims resolved to engage a Dutch cap- 
tain, who assured them that they need not 
fear, for " he would do well enough." The 
point of departure was to be between Hull 
and Grimsby. The men walked across coun- 
try for nearly fifty miles, and the women and 
children were conveyed in the Bark down 
the Trent, then along the Humber to a 
secure little creek. Unfortunately, their boat 
was left stranded at low water, so that, when 
the Dutch vessel appeared, they could not get 
off. The captain began, therefore, to embark 
the men, but no sooner had he conveyed one 
boatload than he saw " a great company both 
horse and foot with bills and guns and other 
weapons " running round the coast to capture 
the fugitives. He swore a great round oath, 



I56 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



and set sail without delay. The poor 
women raised piteous shrieks as their natural 
protectors vanished from sight, while the 
children clung to their mothers, crying and 
shivering with cold. How they fared, the 
narrative does not disclose. The magis- 
trates did not like to imprison them ; their 
homes were broken up ; they were passed on 
from one place to another as if they were 
undesirable aliens. Meanwhile, the voyage 
of the Dutch vessel to Holland was much 
like that of St. Paul as recorded in the Acts. 
For seven days neither sun nor stars ap- 
peared. In the midst of a fearful storm, the 
mariners cried in terror, " We sink ! we 
sink ! " but the pilgrims, with heroic faith, 
answered, "Yet, Lord, Thou canst save." 
The vessel bore the ark of freedom and 
could not sink, and at last they reached 
their desired haven. 

It was well that Robinson, Brewster, and 
Clyfton had not been in the first boatload. 
Quietly, in twos and threes, they smuggled 
the remainder of the pilgrims out of the 
country. They were among the last to 
leave, and, in the summer of 1608, all were 
in Amsterdam. The entry in Zachary 
Clyfton's Bible is profoundly interesting. 
" Memorandum. Richard Clyfton, with his 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH I 57 



wife and children, came into Amsterdam in 
Holland. August, 1608." 

The stay of John Robinson and his party 
in Amsterdam was very brief. We can readily 
imagine that the atmosphere of the Ancient 
Church, with its miserable disputes and 
impending troubles, was utterly distasteful 
to a man of his wide outlook and lofty 
and benignant nature. Nor would Bradford, 
the future statesman and Governor of the 
Plymouth Colony, be interested in the 
apparel of Mrs. Thomasine Johnson. In 
February, 1609, Robinson addressed to the 
Burgomaster and Court of the city of 
Leyden, on behalf of himself and about a 
hundred persons of the Christian reformed 
religion, a request to be permitted to live 
in that city and to carry on their trades. 
The Court replied that they refused free 
ingress to no honest persons ; and so the 
Pilgrim Church removed to Leyden. 

Beautiful Leyden, the fairest city of 
Holland, had played no small part in the 
terrible struggle with Philip II., which had 
issued in the Netherlands Republic. It had 
successfully resisted its memorable siege ; it 
had broken down its sluices and driven back 
the desperadoes of Spain before the advancing 
sea. It had now entered upon a period of 



158 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



extraordinary peace and prosperity. At this 
very time, the young Rembrandt was within 
its walls. William of Orange, in recognition 
of their heroic defence, had offered the 
citizens the alternative of the remission of 
taxation for a period or the founding of a 
University, and they had chosen the latter. 
A city of broad and well-kept streets, beauti- 
fully paved, lined with lindens and elms, it 
must have seemed a sweet refuge to the 
weary exiles. Yet they had to discover some 
means of livelihood. They became craftsmen 
and artisans. Bradford was a fustian worker. 
Brewster gave lessons in English, and later 
set up a publishing house. Robinson became 
a professor in the University. The Church 
rapidly increased. In 161 1, Robinson, with 
his brother-in-law and two others, purchased 
a large house and garden, where the pilgrims 
henceforth met for worship. The site is 
marked to-day by a marble slab, bearing the 
inscription : " On this spot lived, taught, and 
died, John Robinson, 1611-1625." 

We may well pause to inquire what was the 
secret of the unbroken peace of this, the first 
Congregational Church which we can regard 
with unqualified joy and pride. For the 
fellowship was an idyllic one. " Such was 
the true piety, the humble zeal, and fervent 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH 1 59 



love of this people towards God and His 
ways," says Governor Bradford, " and the 
single-heartedness and sincere affection one 
towards another, that they came as near the 
primitive pattern of the first Churches as any 
other Churches of these later times have 
done." Replying to Bernard's " contemptu- 
ous upbraiding " of the Separatists, Robinson 
wrote : " For ourselves I tell you that if ever I 
saw the beauty of Sion and the glory of the 
Lord filling His Tabernacle, it hath been in 
the manifestation of the divers graces of God 
in the Church, in that Heavenly harmony 
and comely order wherein by the grace of 
God we are set and walk." It attracted the 
friendly confidence of some distinguished 
men like Miles Standish, who afterwards 
went out in the Mayflower, and of the young 
English gentleman, Edward Winslow, who, 
visiting Leyden, was so charmed with their 
fellowship that he joined them, and after- 
wards wrote: "I persuade myself never people 
upon earth lived more lovingly together, more 
sweetly than we, the Church at Leyden, did." 
They had a high reputation in the city for 
honesty and industry. What was the secret 
of their fellowship? for human nature is pretty 
much the same everywhere. It was, first of 
all, in the nobility and wisdom of John 



160 BAPTIST 6- CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Robinson himself and also of the leaders of 
the Church. It was, further, in a free and 
sagacious interpretation of Congregational- 
ism. There was no autocracy or oligarchy. 
Robinson had no sympathy with the rigid- 
ness of Johnson or the elaborate order of 
Barrow, and he even simplified the polity 
of Browne. His sympathies were with full 
publicity, the knowledge and consent of the 
people. Spirit was infinitely more to him 
than form, " and none did more offend him 
than such as would be stiff and rigid in 
matters of Outward Order and inveigh against 
the evils of others." 

Want of space forbids us to refer other 
than cursorily to Robinson's enormous 
literary activities and to the great part he 
played in the controversies of his age. The 
bitter struggle between Calvinism and Armi- 
nianism daily agitated the city of Leyden. 
It even shook Europe and England. Robin- 
son was present at the synod of Dort. He 
went constantly to lectures at the University. 
He silenced Polyander in public debate, and 
"became terrible to the Arminians." He 
wrote sixty-two essays of a non-controversial 
kind, besides many other works, and these 
were free from the virulence which was 
characteristic of current theological litera- 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH l6l 



ture. We shall note presently some surprising 
elements in his Congregationalism, but we 
may point out that the root of the matter 
was in him. He contended for the proper 
discipline of the Church ; that the Church 
meant the people and not the officers or 
elders ; that government can never suffer 
by being in the hands of the people ; that 
the people alone must choose the man who 
is to stand to them in the sacred and affec- 
tionate relation of pastor ; and that the true 
Church could not correspond to the mixed 
parish assemblies of the Church of England. 
He had, however, no objection to liturgical 
forms of prayer. 

" After they had lived in Leyden some 
eleven or twelve years," the thought began 
to take shape among them of founding a 
colony in the New World. Such a scheme 
was attractive to the adventurous young 
Englishmen of that day. Moreover, the life 
at Leyden was hard and anxious, but the 
chief reason was, says Bradford, that they 
"had a great hope of laying some good 
foundation for the propagating and advancing 
the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in those 
remote parts of the world." After long nego- 
tiation with James and the Virginia Company, 
it was agreed to send forth the younger and 
12 



1 62 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



stronger members to that part of the long 
Atlantic seaboard, which had been discovered 
by Raleigh and named in honour of Elizabeth, 
and to which Elder Blackwell, in 1618, had 
fared forth on his ill-fated expedition. No 
assurance of liberty of worship could be 
obtained, but the King, having been told 
that the Separatists would support them- 
selves by fishing, replied, " Very good ; it was 
the apostles* own calling," and, pleased with 
his wi,t, he did not refuse to let the exiles go. 
First of all, however, they were required to 
submit a statement of their religious opinions, 
which they did in seven Articles, signed by 
Robinson and Brewster. Early in 1620, a 
day of humiliation and prayer was held. The 
pastor preached from 1 Sam. xxiii. 3, 4, "And 
David's men said unto him, Behold, we be 
afraid here in Judah ; how much more then 
if we come to Keilah against the armies of 
the Philistines ? Then David inquired of 
the Lord yet again." In July, they called 
another day of humiliation, on which the 
pastor preached for some hours, the rest of 
the day being spent in prayers and tears. 
On Saturday, July 22nd, Robinson said 
farewell to them, with truly apostolic words. 
The pilgrims, with such grief that the Dutch 
strangers could not hold back their tears, 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH 1 63 



sailed away from Delft Haven, on the 
Speedwell, Bradford, Brewster, Winslow, and 
Standish were the leaders of the expedition. 
It was the intention of Robinson to go later on. 
When the Speedwell reached Southampton, it 
was joined by the Mayflower and a party of 
Separatists from England. Soon the Speed- 
well sprang a leak. The two vessels made 
for Plymouth Harbour, and thence, on Sep- 
tember 6, 1620, the pilgrims, of whom there 
were a hundred and two, set sail, on the May- 
flower^ for the New World. Across terrible 
and stormy seas they beat their way. On 
November nth, they found themselves at 
Cape Cod, and, after three explorations of the 
country, settled permanently at Plymouth, 
which had been so named by the adventurer, 
John Smith. But it was outside Virginia, 
with its laws and concessions, and so before 
they landed, in the cabin of the Mayflower^ 
they drew up the Charter and Constitu- 
tion of the new Commonwealth, which was 
signed by forty-one men. They were not 
only the pioneers of a Church, but also of 
a State. The Mayflower Compact is so 
important that we transcribe it : — 

" In the name of God, Amen. We whose 
names are underwritten, the loyal Subjects 



164 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, 
by the grace of God, of Great Britain, 
France, and Ireland King, Defender of 
the Faith, etc. 

li Having undertaken, for the glory of 
God and advancement of the Christian 
Faith, and honour of our King and 
Country, a Voyage to plant the first 
Colony in the Northern parts of Vir- 
ginia, do by these presents solemnly and 
mutually in the presence of God, and of 
one another, covenant and combine our- 
selves together into a civil body politic, for 
our better ordering and preservation and 
furtherance of the ends aforesaid ; and 
by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, 
and frame such just and equal Laws, 
Ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices 
from time to time, as shall be thought 
most meet and convenient for the general 
good of the colony, unto which we pro- 
mise all due submission and obedience. 
In witness whereof we have here-under 
subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the 
eleven of November in the year of the 
reign of our sovereign Lord, King James 
of England, France, and Ireland the 
eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. 
Anno Domini 1620" 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH 1 6$ 



All the pilgrims landed on December 21st, 
John Alden being the first, according to 
tradition, to leap ashore upon the Plymouth 
Rock. 

John Robinson lived only five years after 
the departure of the pilgrims, and was buried 
in Leyden on March 4, 1625. One utterance 
of his, often quoted, may be reckoned among 
the great words of human history. It was 
spoken in farewell to the pilgrims, and is 
recorded thus by Winslow : — 

"He was very confident that the Lord had 
more truth and light yet to break forth out 
op His Holy Word." 

Perhaps Robinson was thinking only of 
Church polity, and if so, the saying is true 
in a wider sense than he intended. At least, 
it is certain that, while a convinced Congre- 
gationalism he was a large-minded and 
charitable one. He did not allow differ- 
ences of organisation to prevent communion 
with the reformed Churches of the Conti- 
nent. Yet we cannot read the seven Articles, 
which he signed for submission to James I., 
without astonishment. After making every 
allowance for the fact that they were in- 
tended to minimise as much as possible the 



1 66 BAPTIST y CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



differences from the Church of England, and 
to present the Separatists in a favourable 
light, it is still clear that Robinson was a 
Separatist solely on the ground of vest- 
ments and ceremonies. He assented to 
every Article of the Church of England. 
He accepted the Royal supremacy, and 
was willing to render passive obedience to 
the King, even in things contrary to Scrip- 
ture. While careful not to admit the office 
of a diocesan bishop to be scriptural, he had 
no objection to the civil appointment of 
bishops by the King for the oversight of 
the Churches. 

It lies outside the scope of this book to 
follow the fortunes of Congregationalism in 
New England, yet some explanation must 
be given of the fact that very shortly it was 
dominated, shaped, and directed by Puri- 
tanism. All through the period with which 
we have dealt, England became less possible 
as a home for the Puritans. The high hopes 
they had cherished at the accession of James 
of Scotland had been rudely dispelled, and 
they soon discovered that he had the Stuart 
failing of duplicity. Their chosen repre- 
sentatives at the Hampton Court Conference 
were derided and insulted, though they made 
such simple proposals as that the sign of the 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH l6j 



cross in baptism and the use of the surplice 
should be optional. The King thoroughly 
enjoyed himself as president of a theological 
assembly. He sat, a ludicrous figure, with 
rolling eyes, slobbering tongue, and head too 
large for his body, while exultant bishops 
hailed their champion with ecstasy, and 
Whitgift cried, "Doubtless your Majesty 
speaks by the special assistance of God's 
Spirit." He had suffered much from the 
Scotch Presbyterians, and he made the 
mistake of confusing Puritanism and Pres- 
byterianism together. He broke up the 
Conference with the threat, " I will make 
them conform, or I will harry them out of 
the land, or else do worse." 

The drift of Puritanism from the Church 
of England was increased by the extrava- 
gant claim which now began to be made by 
Anglican bishops, that episcopacy was not 
simply necessary to the bene esse, but even 
to the esse of the Church. That it served a 
good and useful purpose, or was permissible 
as a form of Church government, many Non- 
conformists were ready to admit, but they 
became fiercely antagonistic when Bancroft, 
Bilson, and Laud claimed that it was essen- 
tial and indispensable, and that, without it, 
there could be no Church at all. 



l68 BAPTIST CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Anglicanism blindly pursued its course, 
It seemed to triumph ; but there are victories 
which are more disastrous than defeats. In 
July, 1604, a stricter subscription, ex animo, 
was enforced, and though only about three 
hundred clergy refused, the resentment was 
wide and deep. The bishops made common 
cause with the enemies of popular liberty 
and justice, supporting the hateful powers 
exercised by the High Commission, and also 
the claims for an unrestricted Royal preroga- 
tive. 'At the same time, they set themselves 
against the Puritan House of Commons. 
The judges quashed a decision of the High 
Commission, but the Archbishop appealed 
against the judges. The Royal ({ Declara- 
tion of Sports M was ordered to be read 
from the pulpits on Sunday. Then came 
Laud, first, as Bishop of London, the most 
Puritan diocese in the kingdom, and, in 
1633, as Archbishop of Canterbury, w T ith 
the policy of the Church of England in his 
hands. He set himself to root out Puri- 
tanism. He restored vestments, removed 
the table to the chancel, and railed it off 
as an altar. He was Arminian, the Puritans 
were Calvinistic ; he desired Sunday to be 
divided between Church services and sports ; 
they thought that it ought to be like the 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH 169 



Jewish Sabbath. " Instead of being a 
statesman,'* says Bishop Boyd Carpenter, 
"he was an industrious pedlar in State 
affairs ; instead of being a great prelate, he 
was an episcopal martinet. Coke delighted 
in law ; Laud delighted in laws. The law 
in Coke's hands became the palladium of 
liberty ; in Laud's it was an engine of 
oppression." Moreover, to fines and depri- 
vation he added horrible cruelties. How- 
ever wicked and mistaken, it was strictly 
in accordance with the spirit of the times 
when, in 161 2, Legate was burnt as an 
Arian, and Wightman, the poor crazy 
creature, who announced himself to be the 
Holy Ghost. But to the Puritans it was a 
wholly different thing when Dr. Alexander 
Leighton, the Scotch divine, and father of 
the future archbishop, was tortured with Red 
Indian ingenuity for writing Sioris Plea 
against the Prelacy. One ear was cut off, 
half his nose slit, his cheek branded ; he was 
tied to a post and whipped so that every lash 
brought away flesh, then, seven days later, 
the other ear and cheek were treated in like 
manner. When sentence was pronounced, 
Laud lifted his cap and thanked God. His 
own penalty was paid later on, but our point 
is, that through this dark time, it was borne 



170 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



in upon the Puritans that England was no 
place for them. 

Thus it came to pass that they began to 
emigrate to the New World, and that they 
came to New England in such numbers as 
completely to swamp the Pilgrim Church. 
The Puritans had disliked the Congrega- 
tionalists, but now they all became Separa- 
tists together. They formed the great colony 
of Massachusetts, and were able to realise 
their conception of a Christian State. The 
Independents were not enamoured of reli- 
gious liberty, but the Puritans were resolved 
that no one should have it but themselves. 
Thus the Puritan State was a theocracy, in 
which no one was admitted to the rights of 
citizenship who was not a Church member. 
No toleration was extended to episcopacy 
or to heretical opinions. Provision was 
made for the ministry out of public taxa- 
tion. Roger Williams, the erratic and fiery 
young Welshman, ventured to advocate the 
doctrine of religious liberty, and was com- 
pelled to flee, but found a refuge in Rhode 
Island, where he formed the first free colony. 
To the outsider, the colony must have seemed 
self-condemned, for it quickly became a Cave 
of Adullam, to which repaired the advocates 
of every crank, eccentricity, fad, and extra- 



JOHN ROBINSON — THE PILGRIM CHURCH \*J\ 



ordinary opinion, and all were allowed to 
prophesy and proselytise to their hearts' 
content It was a surprising, daring, and 
far-seeing experiment, for only after long 
travail and agony has the world come to 
see that free speech is best, and " that truth 
is so much larger and stranger, and more 
many-sided than we know of, that it is very 
much better at all costs to hear every one's 
account of it." Yet the Baptist, Roger 
Williams, felt this, and in 1644 — the same 
year in which Milton, in organ tones, pleaded 
for " liberty of unlicensed printing " — he ex- 
pressed it in the Bloody Tenent of Persecution 
for Cause of Conscience, and declared that 
truth " must have no sword, helmet, breast- 
plate, shield, or horse, but what is spiritual 
and of a heavenly nature." 



VIII 



HENRY JACOB 
The Mother Church 

NO movement, which has for its leaders 
narrow, extreme, and violent men, can 
be widely or permanently successful. The 
extraordinary and rapid growth of Congre- 
gationalism, in its two sections of the Inde- 
pendent and Baptist Churches, was largely 
due to the fact that the Puritan party was 
driven more and more to take sides with the 
Separatists. The most striking illustration 
of this was, of course, much later on, and 
Congregationalism owes its great place in 
English life and thought, in no small degree, 
to the expulsion, in 1662, of the Puritan 
clergy from the Church of England, among 
whom were some of the noblest, the most 

eloquent and saintly divines, of whom any 
172 



HENRY JACOB 



173 



Church in any age could boast. But even 
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
in Puritanism " there were great searchings 
of heart" In a sense, Henry Jacob epi- 
tomised his party. His misgivings, his re- 
luctance to separate, his convictions, and his 
hopes of reform in the Established Church 
were shared by many, but his significance as 
a pioneer is in the ominous fact that he 
founded a Congregational Church in London, 
on the advice, and with the approval, of a 
number of the most eminent Puritan clergy. 

Henry Jacob was an Oxford man and a 
graduate of his University. It has been 
mistakenly supposed by some writers that, 
in 1590, he became a Brownist, and in 1593 
fled to Holland. The facts of his career are 
somewhat wrapped in obscurity, but it is 
certain that, in 1596, he was one of the 
Puritan clergy who had personal conference 
with Francis Johnson in the Clink, and urged 
him to conform. Jacob argued that the 
Articles of the National Church contained 
sufficient to make a true Christian, and said, 
therefore, " you ought not to separate from 
us nor to condemn us as wholly abolished 
from Christ." He hinted plainly that the 
imprisonment of the Separatists was imposed 
upon them by their own unnecessary scruples 



174 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



and not by Christ. Men like Johnson and 
Jacob have little in common, and the con- 
ferences could only issue in wider alienation. 
In 1599, Jacob carried the attack into the 
Separatists' own country of Middleberg, by 
publishing there two treatises in defence of 
the Church of England, specially for the 
benefit of Johnson's following. But in all 
this, he was really like Saul of Tarsus, 
"kicking against the pricks." In his heart, 
he was profoundly dissatisfied with Angli- 
canism, and, in 1603, took a leading part in 
promoting the Millenary Petition to King 
James. This being rejected, he could no 
longer remain in the State Church, and, in 
1604, he was silenced. Thereupon, he pub- 
lished Reasons taken out of the Word of 
God for Reforming the Church of England, 
asserting that the only visible Church on 
earth was the particular Church, which 
should be self-governing, and that, for two 
hundred years after Christ, the Churches 
were Congregational in order, and the 
bishops parishional, not diocesan. In 1609^ 
he addressed a Humble Supplication to 
James as one of " the silenced and disgraced 
ministers," and the King's copy still remains, 
with marginal notes in the Royal hand. A 
visit to Leyden, in 16 10, brought him into 



HENRY JACOB 



175 



contact with John Robinson. The two men 
were of the same mould. Deeply spiritual 
and earnest, by temperament linked to 
Anglicanism, but by conviction impelled to- 
wards Congregationalism, both of them 
utterly alien from what was trivial or violent, 
both of them with a touch of that world of 
rank and power from which the Separatist 
was excluded, it was certain that the 
Leyden pastor would profoundly influence 
the troubled Puritan. Six years later, Jacob 
returned to London as a Congregationalist, 
held many meetings with godly and learned 
clergymen, and, after much prayer and fasting, 
the time and the circumstances having been 
seriously weighed, it was concluded by most 
of them that it was warrantable and com- 
mendable to set up a Church in London. 
Jacob " was willing to adventure himself, 
and the rest encouraged him." Thus, in 
1616, during the weak archbishopric of 
Abbott, he founded a Congregational Church 
in Southwark. It was not, as the Dictionary 
of National Biography mistakenly suggests, 
" the first Congregational Church in England," 
but it was the first which took root and en- 
dured on English soil. It was a significant 
event, and marked a new temper and attitude 
in Puritanism. 



I76 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



Jacob remained as pastor of the South- 
wark Church, which has been variously 
known as the 4< Jacob " or " Jessey " Church, 
till 1622, when he resigned with the intention 
of removing to Virginia. Two years later, 
in 1624, he died, according to the contem- 
porary Jessey Records, in Virginia ; the 
Dictionary of National Biography asserts that 
he returned to London and died in the parish 
of St. Andrew Hubbard, but an examination 
of tfye parish register does not support this 
statement Probate of his will was given on 
May 5, 1624, in the Prerogative Court of 
Canterbury. As a British subject in the 
British Colony of Virginia, his will would, 
at that time, have to be proved in that 
Court, as, indeed, was the case with regard 
to the will of Christopher Lawne, 

For the story of the Jacob Church and for 
some important facts of early Baptist history, 
we are indebted to two chief sources. First, 
the Jessey Records and the Kiffin MS., often 
called the Stinton Papers, because they were 
copied by Stinton, to whom Richard Adams, 
the minister of Devonshire Square Baptist 
Church, had lent them. The genuineness of 
these papers, which has been much ques- 
tioned, cannot, after the inquiries of Lofton 
and Burrage, be seriously open to doubt. 



HENRY JACOB 



*77 



The second chief source is the " King's 
Pamphlets," the wonderful collection which 
George Thomason, of the " Rose and Crown," 
began to make in 1641, a task which he 
continued for twenty years. 

In the Records appear a number of names 
of extraordinary interest, some of which are 
very familiar in English history. Among 
the Congregationalists, we may note John 
Lathrop, the successor of Jacob, who united 
courage with meekness, and who, at last, by 
the persecutions of Laud, was compelled to 
flee to New England ; Praise-God Barbon, 
the leatherseller, pastor of the Church which 
met in his shop, " The Lock and Key," 
in Fleet Street, and whose name stood first 
in the list of that Cromwell Parliament 
which was nominated by the Baptist and 
Independent Churches of the land. Among 
Baptists, special mention is due to Henry 
Jessey, " the oracle and idol of his faction," 
the Cambridge graduate and clergyman who 
succeeded Lathrop in the pastorate of the 
Jacob Church, and afterwards, having accepted 
believer's baptism, was baptized by Knollys ; 
Hanserd Knollys, also a Cambridge graduate 
and clergyman, who was led to build, " not 
on works but on grace " ; he migrated to 
New England, but, having advocated religious 
13 



I78 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



liberty, incurred persecution, and came back 
saying that he "might as well be knocked 
about in old England " ; last, but not least, 
the grand old strict communionist Baptist, 
William Kiffin, the wealthy merchant, the 
keen debater, and the faithful pastor. 
" Great as was the authority of Bunyan with 
the Baptists," says Macaulay, "that of 
William Kiffin was still greater." James II. 
vainly tried to cajole the sturdy old man 
with .flattering courtesies and honeyed words. 
In 1 70 1, he passed away at the age of 
eighty-six, leaving behind him a record of 
suffering and fidelity and of devoted service 
to his generation. 

The evolution of the Jacob Church can be 
represented most clearly in diagrammatic 
form. It has been called "the mother Church 
of the Independents." It became a Baptist 
Church, first, with open, and then with strict, 
membership. Of the six Churches which 
sprang from it, five became Baptist. The 
separations and developments which took 
place were, most of them, the result of 
friendly conference, and arose from the rapid 
growth of the Church or from differences on 
the question of baptism, which now began 
seriously to agitate the Separatists. The 
baptismal controversy passed through three 



HENRY JACOB 



179 



distinct and successive stages, which must be 
noted with the utmost care. The first question 
was as to the administrator, or, who should 
baptize ; the second, as to the subject, or, 
who should be baptized ; the third, as to 
the mode, or, how should baptism be 
administered. [See diagram^ pp. 184-5.) 

We have reached the point, then, at which 
we find the first Calvinistic or Particular 
Baptist Church. It must be borne in mind, 
however, that the term Baptist at this stage 
is only used as to the essence of the Baptist 
contention, viz., that the proper subject is the 
believer, and not as to the mode of baptism. 
It has been the custom, in popular usage and 
also of Baptist historians, such as Crosby, 
Evans, and Lofton, to apply the term in this 
way. The Baptist Church in Newgate Street, 
transplanted to London by Helwys and 
Morton in 161 1, was Arminian. Consider- 
ing the position of Calvinism in England, 
Calvinistic Baptist Churches were sure to 
arise. It is, however, important to notice that 
there was absolutely no fellowship between 
the two sets of Churches, nor ever has been. 
The old General Baptist Churches, for the 
most part, became Unitarian, and still keep 
up a shadowy legal existence, having no in- 
tercourse whatever with the Baptist body. 



l80 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



The General Baptist New Connexion, formed 
in 1770, and amalgamated with the Particular 
Baptists in 1891, had a different origin and 
history. The Calvinists are the real fore- 
fathers of the modern Denomination. 

The origin of the Particular Baptists has 
been dated 1633 ; but this is a mistake. It 
has rested upon Crosby's version of an 
extract from the Kiffin and Jessey papers, 
which has misled subsequent writers. Crosby 
place? the quotation in inverted commas, as 
though it were an exact extract, but he has 
really fused together, and, doubtless unin- 
tentionally, garbled different passages taken 
from the Jessey Records and from the 
Kiffin papers, and has even quoted the 
words "as they believed that Baptism was 
not rightly administered to infants," which 
are dated 1638, and joined them on to words 
taken from an extract dated 1633. The 
discrepancy between Crosby's version and 
the record in the Jessey and Kiffin papers is 
clearly shown in the following : — 

Jessey Records. 

" 1633 There having been much 1633 
discussing these deny- 
ing truth of the Parish 
Churches, and the Church 
being now become so large 



HENRY JACOB 



that it might be prejud- 
icial, these following 
desired dismission that they 
might become an Entire 
Church, and further the 
Communion of those Churches 
in Order amongst themselves : 
which at last was granted 
them and performed Sept- 
ember 12th, 1633. . . . 
Mr. Eaton with some 
others receiving a further 
Baptism. Others 
joined to them. 
1638 These also being of the 
same judgment with Sam 
Eaton, and desiring to 
depart and not to be 
censured, our interest in 
them was remitted with 
prayer made in their be- 
half, Tune 8th, 1638 ; 
they having first for- 
saken us and joined with 
Mr, Spilsbry " 



Kifpin MS. 

" Sundry of the Church where- 
of Mr. Jacob and Mr. John 
Lathrop had been pastors, 
being dissatisfied with 
1633 the Church's owning of 1633 
English Parishes to be true 
Churches, desired dismission 
and joined together among 
themselves." 



1 82 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



"Mr. Thomas Wilson, Mr. Pen, and 
H. Pen and three more, being 
convinced that Baptism was not 
1638 for infants but professed 1638 
believers, joined with Mr. 
John Spilsbury, the Church's 
favour being desired therein." 



Compare with this Crosby's version : — 

"The Church, considering that they were now grown 
ver}' numerous, and so more than could in these times 
of persecution conveniently meet together, and 
believing also that those persons acted from a 
principle of conscience, and not obstinacy, agreed 
to allow them the liberty they desired, and that 
they should be constituted a distinct Church ; 
which was performed the 12th Sept. 1633. And as 
they believed that Baptism was not rightly admin- 
istered to infants, -so they looked upon the baptism 
they had received in that age as invalid ; whereupon 
most or all of them received a new baptism. Their 
minister was Mr. John Spilsbury." 

Let us try to reconstruct the story from 
the originals. During the pastorate of 
Lathrop, in 1633, some members of the 
Jacob Church, who held that baptism by the 
parish clergyman was invalid, not because it 
was infant baptism, but because it was received 
in the Church of England, were dismissed 
to form a separate Church. Samuel Eaton, 
the button- maker, joined them, and was 
rebaptized, as also were some others. John 
Taylor (A Swarms of Sectaries^ 1641) tells 



HENRY JACOB 



183 



us that Spilsbury baptized Eaton in " Ana- 
baptist fashion." Crosby states that Spils- 
bury was pastor of the Eaton Church, but no 
weight can be attached to his confused record. 
But, in 1638, the second stage of the baptismal 
controversy was reached. A further dis- 
missal took place from the Jacob Church of 
some who, rejecting infant baptism, joined 
with Mr. Spilsbury, and were " of the same 
judgment with Samuel Eaton." In the 
present state of the evidence, we may say 
with certainty that, in 1638, there was either 
the first Calvinistic Baptist Church, with 
John Spilsbury as its pastor, containing 
Samuel Eaton, Mark Lucar, and others, or 
that, in the same year, there were two 
Calvinistic Baptist Churches in London, the 
one under John Spilsbury and the other 
under Samuel Eaton. In January, 1642 
(N.S.)> the third stage in the baptismal con- 
troversy had been reached, and the people 
with Spilsbury and Eaton had become 
immersionist, some being baptized a third 
time. 

The origin of the Particular Baptist 
Denomination must be dated, therefore, 
some time after 1633, an d not later than 
1638. 

The first so-called English Baptist Churches 



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♦ 18 



1 86 BAPTIST & CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



were not immersionist, i.e., they held the 
doctrine of believers' baptism but were 
indifferent as to the mode. 

To deal first with the General Baptists, the 
practice of the Church of Helwys and 
Morton was in agreement with that of the 
Mennonites, for it was reported by the 
Mennonite ministers who inquired as to the 
foundation and form of their baptism, " We 
have not found that there was any difference 
at all, neither in the one nor the other thing, 
between them and us." Now, as the result 
of the protracted and heated controversy in 
America, known as the Whitsitt controversy, 
it has been established, beyond the possibility 
of reasonable doubt, that the Mennonites 
administered baptism by affusion, until, in 
1620, a section called the Collegian ten, at 
Rhynsberg, began to immerse. 

As to the adoption of immersion by the 
Particular Baptists, we read, in an entry in 
the Kiffin MS., that Mr. Richard Blunt 
became convinced of baptism that it ought 
to be by dipping the body into the water, 
" none having themselves so practised in 
England to professed believers." Again, 
that the members of the Church who thought 
baptism should be by immersion, could not 
find an administrator in England, "because, 



HENRY JACOB 



I8 7 



though some in this nation rejected the bap- 
tism of infants, yet they had not, as they 
knew of, revived the ancient custom of im- 
mersion." Mr. Blunt, therefore, went over, 
in i64i,to Holland, received immersion from 
the Collegianten, and, on his return, baptized 
Mr. Blacklock, the teacher of the Church, 
and these two, in January, 1642 (N.S.), bap- 
tized fifty-one others. 

The date of Mr. Blunt's conversion to 
believers' baptism and visit to Holland has 
been hitherto said to be " 1640, 3rd month" ; 
but this also is a mistake, and has arisen 
through confusing two entirely distinct 
events recorded in the Kiffin MS. The 
originals show clearly that the date, " 1640, 
3rd mo." May 18 (N.S.), applies to the 
friendly division of the Church. Mr. Blunt's 
change of view and baptism occurred later, 
in 1 64 1. This fits in exactly with his return 
in January, 1642, and the baptism of his 
fellow-members. 

That the mode of immersion seemed 
strange to the Separatists is clearly shown 
in a discourse by Praise-God Barbon, in 
April, 1642, in which we read : — 

" The way of new baptizing, lately begun 
to be practised/' and again " but now very 
lately some are mightily taken, as having 



1 88 BAPTIST &> CONGREGATIONAL P/ONEEJRS 



found out a new defect in the baptism . . . 
so addressing themselves to be baptized the 
third time after the true way and manner 
they have found out, which they account a 
precious truth* The particular of their 
opinion and practice is to dip." It would 
be interesting to trace the history of the 
substitution of pouring or sprinkling for im- 
mersion on the Continent and in England, 
but we must content ourselves with pointing 
out ,that, from the twelfth century onwards, 
apart from the Greek Church, the strong 
current of opinion and practice on the 
Continent was against immersion, until at 
last pouring became almost universal. Few, 
either of the Continental or English Ana- 
baptists, immersed, and their practice is 
illustrated in a record dated April, 1525, 
that : 

" Hubmeier called his followers together, 
and having sent for a pail of water, solemnly 
baptized 300 persons at one time." 

The Reformed Churches and the Presby- 
terians yielded to the influence of Calvin, and 
pronounced in favour of sprinkling. 

Immersion held its own to a much later 
date in England, shut off from Continental 
thought by its insular position. Immersion 
was never entirely abandoned. But in spite 



HENRY JACOB 



of determined efforts on the part of eccle- 
siastical rulers, the Church of England had 
largely discontinued immersion by the year 
1600, though it never took up the extraordi- 
nary position of the majority of the West- 
minster divines that immersion was not a 
legitimate mode of baptism. Immersion re- 
mained in the Prayer Book as the prescribed, 
though discredited, method, and, even as late 
as 1630, the infant Prince, afterwards Charles 
II., was immersed. 

The Baptists had now definitely taken up 
the position with regard to the subject and 
mode of the ordinance to which they have 
ever since adhered. In 1644, they adopted, 
with a view to prevent misrepresentation, a 
Confession of fifty Articles signed by fifteen 
ministers, Kiffin heading the list. Two years 
later, this was revised and supplemented, on 
behalf of seven English Churches and one 
French Church, and presented to Parliament 
It declared that disciples only ought to be 
baptized, on profession of faith, and that the 
manner of the ordinance was to dip or plunge 
the body under water as a symbol of the 
death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. A 
note added, 11 yet so as convenient garments 
be upon both the administrator and subject 
with all modesty." 



190 BAPTIST 6* CONGREGATIONAL PIONEERS 



From this point, the Baptists and the 
Independents, side by side, have travelled 
along that pathway of struggle, advance, 
and liberty which has led to their present 
world-wide influence. For a brief period, the 
freedom of England was in their charge. 
Together, they made up the most advanced 
and resolute element in Cromwell's army. 
Together, they marched to victory at Naseby 
and Marston Moor. Together, they nomi- 
nated the Parliament of 1653, probably the 
one English Parliament absolutely free from 
vested interests and seeking only the public 
good. At one time, most of Cromwell's 
immediate staff of officers were Baptists. 
Cromwell was an Independent. His great 
rival, Major-General Harrison, the head of 
the Army in 1653, was a Baptist. The Bap- 
tists and Independents together have played 
a great part in the making of modern Eng- 
land. Together with the other Free Churches, 
they offer the surest guarantee of English 
liberty and of the maintenance and exten- 
sion of spiritual religion throughout the 
world. 

We have sought faithfully to present the 
pioneers as they really were, to " extenuate 
nothing nor set down aught in malice." 
Essentially they were men of their own age, 



HENRY JACOB 



IQI 



often sharing to the full in its narrowness, 
its bitterness, and its mistaken interpretations 
of the mind and law of Christ But we may 
well ask whether we have their heroic courage 
and endurance, their fidelity to conscience, 
and their willingness both to venture all 
that most men count dear, and to suffer all 
that intolerance could devise, rather than 
" alter or neglect " one iota of the Word of 
God. 

Is true freedom but to break 

Fetters for our own dear sake, 

And, with leathern hearts, forget 

That we owe mankind a debt? 

No ! true Freedom is to share 

All the chains our brothers wear, 

And with heart and hand to be 

Earnest to make others free ! 

They are slaves who fear to speak 

For the fallen and the weak ; 

They are slaves who will not choose 

Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, 

Rather than in silence shrink 

From the truth they needs must think; 

They are slaves who dare not be 

In the right with two or three. 



INDEX 



Ainsworth, Henry, 109, 115, 120-123 

Anabaptists, not to be confused with Baptists, 15 ; first 

appearance in England, 15 ; defined, 17 
Ancient Church, The, 80, 105-124, 138 
Andrewes, Bishop, 77 
Articles, Thirty-nine, 9 
Askew, Anne, 16 
Aylmer, 59, 96 

Bancroft, 31 

Baptism by immersion, 183, 186-189 
Baptismal controversy, three stages of, 182 
Baptist Pioneers defined, 16 

Baptists, General, beginning of, 140-142 ; Particular, 

beginning of, 180 
Barbon, Praise-God, 177, 187 
Barrow, Henry, 54-86 
Bernard, 128, 133, 135, 136 
Bible, 2, 4 

Blackwell, Elder, 123 
Blunt, Richard, 186 
Booking, Church at, 16 

14 193 



194 



INDEX 



Bolton, 19 
Boucher, Joan. 16 

Bradford, Governor, 118, 119, 154, 157, 159, 163 
Brewster, William, 154, 156, 162 
Bridges, D. Iohn, 95 
Browne, Robert, 21-53 
Busher, Leonard, 148 

Canne, John, 123 
Cartwright, n, 80 
Chiton, Richard, 132, 154, 156 
Confessions, Baptist, 144 

Congregational, formation of first Church, 35 ; first 

London Church, 80 
Congregationalism in New England, 166 
Conventicle Act, 106 
Cooke, Robert, 15, 147 
Crosby, error in Baptist dates, 180 

Diagram, evolution of the Mother Church, 184 

Eaton, Samuel, 182 

Fitz, Richard, 19 

Greenham. Richard, 27 

Greenwood, John, 60, 61, 62, 63, 73, 75, 78, 82 

Grindal, 13, 57 

Harrison. Robert 25, 33, 39. 40, 42 
Helwys, 120, 134, 140, 145, 147 

Jacob, Henry, 172-176 
Jessey, Henry, 177 
Johnson, Francis, 80, 105-124 
Johnson, George. 112. 114, 117 
Johnson, John, 119 



INDEX 



195 



Kiffin, William, 178 
Knollys, Hanserd, 177 

Lathrop, John, 177 
Laud, 168 

Lawne, Christopher, 112, 120, 176 
Legate, 169 

Liberty of conscience, 44, 45, 46, 148, 189 
Lucar, Mark, 183 

Marian Exile, effects of, 10 
Martin Marprelate, 80, 89, 95, 96 
Mayflower, 163 
Mennonite Church, 17, 186 
Morton, John, 120, 134 

Parker, Archbishop, 11 
Penry, John, 87-104 

Rippon, Roger, 75 

Robinson, John, 134, 136, 141, 150-171 
Rough, John, 18 

Separatism, 13, 18, 19, 79 
Smith, Robert, 3, 16 
Smyth, John, 120, 125-149 
Spilsbury, John, 182 
Standish, Miles, 159, 163 
Stinton Papers, 176 
Studley, Daniel, 75, 120 
Sympson, Cuthbert, 18 

Test Act, First, 9 
Thomason, George, 177 
Throckmorton, Job, 79, 94 
Toleration, principle of religious, 147 

Udall, 80, 93 
Uniformity, Act of, 8 



196 



INDEX 



Whitgift, 12, 54, 57, 93, 101 
White, Thomas, 120 
Wightman, 169 
Williams, Roger, 170 
Winslow, Edward, 159, 163 
Wyclif, John, 1 



UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON. 




